IC INFORMATION Characters Name: Badou Nails Age: 14 (younger than current canon, flashback age) Canon: DOGS/DOGS; Bullets & Carnage Canon Point: Pre-series, immediately after Dave's murder/disappearance and the loss of his eye. Species: Human Gender: Male Orientation: FOURTEEN
History: DOGS/DOGS; B&C focus on the stories of 4 main protagonists, unkillable zombie Heine, PI Badou, swordswoman Naoto, and old gun Mihai, coming together against a backdrop of genetic modification and rampant family fuckery. Since this younger version of Badou has not yet grown up into the 21-year old suicide junkie, nor met Heine, Naoto, or Mihai, to go on and have further wacky adventures, I’m not going to focus too much on the plot of main story, since it doesn’t have much to do with what I would actually be playing, which centers around the flashbacks/the one-shot/Dave/Badou’s growth of character in response to Dave, and the main themes of family, violence, and life in the Underground.
The DOGS world is a rough place to live. Set in some arbitrarily European dystopian future, Badou lives underground in what can be compared to Gotham City on genetic modification. Violence, prostitution, crime, corruption in the government, and fucking around with your DNA is common. While Badou is one of the main characters in the series, out of the main four protagonists we have the least information about his pre-series past. These tidbits about his past tend to come in the form of Badou’s own, subjective comments, or private flashbacks that (usually) involve Dave and the one-shot Miwa did of Badou having a bad day and reminiscing. Badou is generally not very forthcoming about his past largely because of Dave – while he eventually claims to Heine and Naoto he once had a brother, it’s only after a policeman has already mentioned him. Likewise, in the flashbacks, the focus is always on Dave’s dialogue, Dave’s dreams, and Dave’s influence on Badou. It’s through this that we come to understand how Badou’s character and Dave’s character both directly correlate and starkly contrast one another, Dave’s influence (or non-influence) having constant cause-and-effect changes on a young Badou.
Pre-series, it is shown that Badou and Dave lived together in one of the city’s many squalid flats. No parents or other siblings are ever mentioned in the Nails family, and one way or another, it is left up to Dave to raise his younger brother, Badou. The panels which show their living together tend to have only the bare essentials – a couch to sleep on, a table to eat on, etc etc. In the one-shot flashback, Dave is bitching about money, making their below-average income state even more apparent (the cost of cigarettes is too high, much less the cost of living). And it’s no wonder – the brothers live off the erratic paychecks of Dave, a self-proclaimed private investigator and freelance journalist. Dave worked digging up dirt and causing riots and scandals in the news, doing jobs at irregular hours and making enemies in low places. Badou makes offhand mentions in the series that he’d tagged along and actively helped on some of his brother’s jobs; giving him both a taste for digging up info and the adrenaline-high style of that “hardboiled life.” Dave’s last job – that of investigating the genetic modification going on in the Below, it’s ties to those High Up – is what eventually draws Badou’s story into the main series’ web of characters. Dave’s murder is a catalyst for Badou, more negative from the start, to jump into the “bullets and carnage” that is Heine and Naoto’s path downwards.
Appearance: Like his brother, Badou has a messy head of shocking orange-red hair, perpetually scruffy. Badou’s hair is longer than Dave’s, grown out to just above his shoulders, and his remaining eye is the same shade of green as his brother’s. Living underground, Dave and Badou aren’t exactly tan – they are extremely pale, with the odd smattering of dusty freckles.
As for build, from the start, Badou is a lanky motherfucker – where Dave is broader and stockier, Badou is all angles and bones, thin and tall for his age, already clocking in at 5’4. Badou’s final canon height is suspected be around 6’1, and this junkyard bone awkwardness would be at its fucking peak at the tender age of 14 and shitty. Where Dave’s body strength is centered more in his chest and core, Badou’s is outsourced into wiry arms and legs.
Neither male is exactly healthy looking, as they subsist on (Badou’s homemade) diet of whatever the fuck was around/whatever the fuck they could afford. Nevertheless, there’s a certain brittle quality about Badou that speaks to a cockroach, survivalist disposition. Badou is probably often bruised, bandaged, and bleeding, kicking around like the punkass he is in shitty jeans and t-shirt.
Personality: Badou’s personality, pre-series and current, is in many ways a dark mirror to Dave’s, emulation as much as it is opposite response. Where Dave is an idealist, chasing bad guys and splashing ink for social justice, Badou is left to face the reality of trying to keep their electricity from being cut off. Badou mentions that he knows how to sew because his brother never learned any domestic skills – it was Badou that had to fix Dave’s shot-up clothes, fix their meals, and keep his feet planted firmly on the ground, while Dave pursued his goals. Where Dave sees a broken city and wants to expose the wound to air it, Badou grows up eventually concluding that everyone in the city is “just scum,” actually contributing to the violence rather than trying to stop it; Heine and Badou are sometimes good guys, sometimes bad guys, but always crazy, violent guys. This is a sharp contrast to Dave, who seems to be in possession of all his marbles, and to have been more inclined to flight than fight. In Badou’s flashbacks, Dave uses trickery and evasion to escape with his info, to go on to create something with it. Badou, on the other hand, almost always has to resort to physical violence to solve problems, and he usually destroys his own hard work in the process of racking up the body count. Despite these basic ideological differences, Badou idolizes Dave utterly up until his death, constantly tailing him on mooching expeditions, jobs, anywhere that Dave would allow Badou to go (and some places he didn’t).In flashbacks, he is (uncharacteristically for his current-day character) attentively listening to everything the older Nails says, although whether he adheres to the gospel of Dave is another story entirely – which is unfortunate, given that Dave’s parenting style is essentially already a “do what I say, not what I do” endeavor. Badou’s emulation of Dave probably also leads back to wanting to be a part of that carefree, “hardboiled” way of life that Dave so seemed to enjoy; after all, dreaming Dave sees life as “one big party, and if you're gonna blow it, it should go out in one big bang.” Badou’s party is the realistic version of this romantic sentiment, and judging from the eventual wake of corpses, it’s a party that got out of control. Dave’s going out in a “big bang,” grinning at recently disfigured Badou as he falls to his death into darkness, is not a glamorous, triumphant end. "What if you die in one big party?" Badou is left alone to ask.
All of these flashbacks focus on Dave and Badou’s growth in response, so Badou’s pre-series life outside of his brother entails a lot of headcanon and meta extrapolation. We get some information from Badou's run-ins with Daniella, a woman who has become cracked by the Underground, and because of her dementia, sometimes confuses Badou for the long-gone Dave. She implies that Badou, despite being glued to Dave's side, was always "grumbling under his breath" when they came in together. After praising Badou for being mature for his age, Daniella requests that 'Dave' not mention it to Badou, as he'll "turn bright red and get mad." As a shitty 14 year old, Badou always appears in panels to be just that – mad, scowling, lazy, skeptical, and listening to his pipe-dreaming older brother rant romantically about destitution and death. As a realist, he’s constantly wound up, and his releases often result in loud outbursts and acerbic, spastic behavior. Having grown up in an unsafe environment with an unreliable guardian, Badou is slow to give a shit and even slower to trust – but it isn’t impossible, and his curiosity can easily get the better of him in many situations (almost as easily as his temper). Strangers pose both threat and intrigue, and his interactions with those of his own age (and even older) tend to be rough and antagonistic. He is the kind of kid that doesn’t have many (any) friends, yet everyone knows his name. Badou tends to expect the worst – so he makes his best efforts to beat the worst there.
Pre-series Badou has not yet has found the stress outlets of violence, addiction, and slap-bang camaraderie, and so spends much of his time worrying and snapping snark at others. Dave has engendered him with a kind of attitude which leads him to constantly question and interrogate his surroundings, which makes him as intelligent and quick on the uptake as it can make him rude and insufferable. As shown with Dave, he can be painstakingly loyal and put great weight on himself for the sake of those he’s pitched his banner behind, even to his own detriment – while impatient about stupid shit, he’d wait for days for Dave to come home from a job ("Are you okay, bro?"). As he expects nothing from the world around him (or even his own kin), he has a severe lack of entitlement, his temper usually flaring purely out of exasperation for exasperation’s sake, a stressed-out 14 year old’s explosiveness ("What the hell is this?!"). He does have a sense of humour under all that tsun tsun, but whether or not it’s fit for public consumption (read; non-Nails) is another thing entirely. He will have a tendency to tease and pick on both those he dislikes and those he feels affection for, as that is also how he’s been raised – as a “Bad Boy.”
Abilities: ~*Magical*~ abilities and strengths: In a world where genetic modification is prevalent enough that Badou wouldn’t double-glance at a pigheaded humanoid, Badou himself is totally without modification. Genetically, he’s 100% human, but living in the Underground produces a relatively tough kind of human. As far as skills and strengths go, Badou has the unbelievable ability to piss off anyone, anytime, anywhere. This results from his skill of being far too fucking clever for his age, the ‘realistic’ half of the Nails duo; his sense of self-preservation is likely the only thing that keeps him alive in many situations that either his attitude (or his brother’s nosiness) has gotten him into. Like Dave, Badou is brains rather than brawn, amazing survival instincts, and really, really good sprinting abilities. Despite being made of bones and shitty willpower, Badou is a relatively okay scrapper just by way of living in the fucked-up, underground urban environment that DOGS is set in. As Badou was brought up by and idolizes his brother, his skill set is similar to Dave’s, but always tempered with a kind of negativism – whereas Dave’s charisma strength lies in his being easygoing and casual, Badou’s charisma is linked more to a kind of frenetic energy, which makes people stop and stare.
In series, Badou’s strength lies in being a bloodthirsty berserker-for-hire, a very real side of him that emerges when he hasn’t smoked enough to subdue it. Without smoke (cigarette or gunsmoke), Badou is prone to wildly laughing homicidal rampages, throwing his usually close-guarded self preservation to the wind – and he doesn’t stop until he’s gotten another smoke fix, or until someone has beaten him into an unconscious pulp. Pre-series, however, he hasn’t had the mental trauma of watching his brother die and living on the (very dangerous) streets of the Underground to serve as a catalyst for this mental instability. That is not to say that, without Dave’s death, Badou does not have psychological problems underlying the lolworthy puberty rage. If Badou were pushed, signs of these as of yet latent ‘strengths’ – disregard of human life, lack of self-preservation, manic persistence in violence, severe addiction problems, and all around bad humour – would begin to display.
SAMPLES First Person: Previously played at gargleblasted, typical text post here.
Third Person: Badou, a rag-tag stray with a rust red cloth bandage wrapped around half his head, is reeling from the light.
Well, to be fair, he is reeling from a lot of things – like the sudden abduction by fuck-knows-who into what looks like a completely different world. The absence of city clamour and loud voices sets his teeth on edge, and the panic seeping from the silence soaks into his ruddy sneakers (coating old layers of fearthrillanxiety). The boy takes off the open street as quickly as his long legs can take him, seeking any dark elsewhere (anywhere but here, where it's quiet enough to hear the sprinklers on the lawns, like some kinda horror movie.)
But the light, the damn light – it's brighter than anything he can ever remember experiencing, in a run-down faded flat, with electricity bills that just don’t pay themselves. His vision, half-obscured from the start, is flickering unreliably, like a lightbulb swinging in a closet; he takes a corner into the shadows sharply, finally looking upupup from the safer vantage of (relative) dark. The one bright green reflexively snaps back down, off the unbelievable, bright speck above, achingaching (like his right eye isn't anymore, but he can't focus long enough to process it, that healed wound). He blinks, stumbles with the pain of it, covering his remaining eye with a bandaged hand. He sways, once, twice, feeling sick.
And like a gangly foal (like a gangly fool), he trips face-first into a rose bush.
"Shit! Fuckin' -- goddamnit -- !"
Is it your perfectly manicured lawn he's destroying?
OTHER Housing Request?: 1470 Did you read the rules and FAQ?: Yep! Would you like your application to be unscreened?: Sure.
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Re: badou nails | dogs | unreserved
Characters Name: Badou Nails
Age: 14 (younger than current canon, flashback age)
Canon: DOGS/DOGS; Bullets & Carnage
Canon Point: Pre-series, immediately after Dave's murder/disappearance and the loss of his eye.
Species: Human
Gender: Male
Orientation: FOURTEEN
History: DOGS/DOGS; B&C focus on the stories of 4 main protagonists, unkillable zombie Heine, PI Badou, swordswoman Naoto, and old gun Mihai, coming together against a backdrop of genetic modification and rampant family fuckery. Since this younger version of Badou has not yet grown up into the 21-year old suicide junkie, nor met Heine, Naoto, or Mihai, to go on and have further wacky adventures, I’m not going to focus too much on the plot of main story, since it doesn’t have much to do with what I would actually be playing, which centers around the flashbacks/the one-shot/Dave/Badou’s growth of character in response to Dave, and the main themes of family, violence, and life in the Underground.
The DOGS world is a rough place to live. Set in some arbitrarily European dystopian future, Badou lives underground in what can be compared to Gotham City on genetic modification. Violence, prostitution, crime, corruption in the government, and fucking around with your DNA is common. While Badou is one of the main characters in the series, out of the main four protagonists we have the least information about his pre-series past. These tidbits about his past tend to come in the form of Badou’s own, subjective comments, or private flashbacks that (usually) involve Dave and the one-shot Miwa did of Badou having a bad day and reminiscing. Badou is generally not very forthcoming about his past largely because of Dave – while he eventually claims to Heine and Naoto he once had a brother, it’s only after a policeman has already mentioned him. Likewise, in the flashbacks, the focus is always on Dave’s dialogue, Dave’s dreams, and Dave’s influence on Badou. It’s through this that we come to understand how Badou’s character and Dave’s character both directly correlate and starkly contrast one another, Dave’s influence (or non-influence) having constant cause-and-effect changes on a young Badou.
Pre-series, it is shown that Badou and Dave lived together in one of the city’s many squalid flats. No parents or other siblings are ever mentioned in the Nails family, and one way or another, it is left up to Dave to raise his younger brother, Badou. The panels which show their living together tend to have only the bare essentials – a couch to sleep on, a table to eat on, etc etc. In the one-shot flashback, Dave is bitching about money, making their below-average income state even more apparent (the cost of cigarettes is too high, much less the cost of living). And it’s no wonder – the brothers live off the erratic paychecks of Dave, a self-proclaimed private investigator and freelance journalist. Dave worked digging up dirt and causing riots and scandals in the news, doing jobs at irregular hours and making enemies in low places. Badou makes offhand mentions in the series that he’d tagged along and actively helped on some of his brother’s jobs; giving him both a taste for digging up info and the adrenaline-high style of that “hardboiled life.” Dave’s last job – that of investigating the genetic modification going on in the Below, it’s ties to those High Up – is what eventually draws Badou’s story into the main series’ web of characters. Dave’s murder is a catalyst for Badou, more negative from the start, to jump into the “bullets and carnage” that is Heine and Naoto’s path downwards.
Appearance:
Like his brother, Badou has a messy head of shocking orange-red hair, perpetually scruffy. Badou’s hair is longer than Dave’s, grown out to just above his shoulders, and his remaining eye is the same shade of green as his brother’s. Living underground, Dave and Badou aren’t exactly tan – they are extremely pale, with the odd smattering of dusty freckles.
As for build, from the start, Badou is a lanky motherfucker – where Dave is broader and stockier, Badou is all angles and bones, thin and tall for his age, already clocking in at 5’4. Badou’s final canon height is suspected be around 6’1, and this junkyard bone awkwardness would be at its fucking peak at the tender age of 14 and shitty. Where Dave’s body strength is centered more in his chest and core, Badou’s is outsourced into wiry arms and legs.
Neither male is exactly healthy looking, as they subsist on (Badou’s homemade) diet of whatever the fuck was around/whatever the fuck they could afford. Nevertheless, there’s a certain brittle quality about Badou that speaks to a cockroach, survivalist disposition. Badou is probably often bruised, bandaged, and bleeding, kicking around like the punkass he is in shitty jeans and t-shirt.
Re: badou nails | dogs | unreserved
Badou’s personality, pre-series and current, is in many ways a dark mirror to Dave’s, emulation as much as it is opposite response. Where Dave is an idealist, chasing bad guys and splashing ink for social justice, Badou is left to face the reality of trying to keep their electricity from being cut off. Badou mentions that he knows how to sew because his brother never learned any domestic skills – it was Badou that had to fix Dave’s shot-up clothes, fix their meals, and keep his feet planted firmly on the ground, while Dave pursued his goals. Where Dave sees a broken city and wants to expose the wound to air it, Badou grows up eventually concluding that everyone in the city is “just scum,” actually contributing to the violence rather than trying to stop it; Heine and Badou are sometimes good guys, sometimes bad guys, but always crazy, violent guys. This is a sharp contrast to Dave, who seems to be in possession of all his marbles, and to have been more inclined to flight than fight. In Badou’s flashbacks, Dave uses trickery and evasion to escape with his info, to go on to create something with it. Badou, on the other hand, almost always has to resort to physical violence to solve problems, and he usually destroys his own hard work in the process of racking up the body count. Despite these basic ideological differences, Badou idolizes Dave utterly up until his death, constantly tailing him on mooching expeditions, jobs, anywhere that Dave would allow Badou to go (and some places he didn’t).In flashbacks, he is (uncharacteristically for his current-day character) attentively listening to everything the older Nails says, although whether he adheres to the gospel of Dave is another story entirely – which is unfortunate, given that Dave’s parenting style is essentially already a “do what I say, not what I do” endeavor. Badou’s emulation of Dave probably also leads back to wanting to be a part of that carefree, “hardboiled” way of life that Dave so seemed to enjoy; after all, dreaming Dave sees life as “one big party, and if you're gonna blow it, it should go out in one big bang.” Badou’s party is the realistic version of this romantic sentiment, and judging from the eventual wake of corpses, it’s a party that got out of control. Dave’s going out in a “big bang,” grinning at recently disfigured Badou as he falls to his death into darkness, is not a glamorous, triumphant end. "What if you die in one big party?" Badou is left alone to ask.
All of these flashbacks focus on Dave and Badou’s growth in response, so Badou’s pre-series life outside of his brother entails a lot of headcanon and meta extrapolation. We get some information from Badou's run-ins with Daniella, a woman who has become cracked by the Underground, and because of her dementia, sometimes confuses Badou for the long-gone Dave. She implies that Badou, despite being glued to Dave's side, was always "grumbling under his breath" when they came in together. After praising Badou for being mature for his age, Daniella requests that 'Dave' not mention it to Badou, as he'll "turn bright red and get mad." As a shitty 14 year old, Badou always appears in panels to be just that – mad, scowling, lazy, skeptical, and listening to his pipe-dreaming older brother rant romantically about destitution and death. As a realist, he’s constantly wound up, and his releases often result in loud outbursts and acerbic, spastic behavior. Having grown up in an unsafe environment with an unreliable guardian, Badou is slow to give a shit and even slower to trust – but it isn’t impossible, and his curiosity can easily get the better of him in many situations (almost as easily as his temper). Strangers pose both threat and intrigue, and his interactions with those of his own age (and even older) tend to be rough and antagonistic. He is the kind of kid that doesn’t have many (any) friends, yet everyone knows his name. Badou tends to expect the worst – so he makes his best efforts to beat the worst there.
Pre-series Badou has not yet has found the stress outlets of violence, addiction, and slap-bang camaraderie, and so spends much of his time worrying and snapping snark at others. Dave has engendered him with a kind of attitude which leads him to constantly question and interrogate his surroundings, which makes him as intelligent and quick on the uptake as it can make him rude and insufferable. As shown with Dave, he can be painstakingly loyal and put great weight on himself for the sake of those he’s pitched his banner behind, even to his own detriment – while impatient about stupid shit, he’d wait for days for Dave to come home from a job ("Are you okay, bro?"). As he expects nothing from the world around him (or even his own kin), he has a severe lack of entitlement, his temper usually flaring purely out of exasperation for exasperation’s sake, a stressed-out 14 year old’s explosiveness ("What the hell is this?!"). He does have a sense of humour under all that tsun tsun, but whether or not it’s fit for public consumption (read; non-Nails) is another thing entirely. He will have a tendency to tease and pick on both those he dislikes and those he feels affection for, as that is also how he’s been raised – as a “Bad Boy.”
Abilities:
~*Magical*~ abilities and strengths: In a world where genetic modification is prevalent enough that Badou wouldn’t double-glance at a pigheaded humanoid, Badou himself is totally without modification. Genetically, he’s 100% human, but living in the Underground produces a relatively tough kind of human. As far as skills and strengths go, Badou has the unbelievable ability to piss off anyone, anytime, anywhere. This results from his skill of being far too fucking clever for his age, the ‘realistic’ half of the Nails duo; his sense of self-preservation is likely the only thing that keeps him alive in many situations that either his attitude (or his brother’s nosiness) has gotten him into. Like Dave, Badou is brains rather than brawn, amazing survival instincts, and really, really good sprinting abilities. Despite being made of bones and shitty willpower, Badou is a relatively okay scrapper just by way of living in the fucked-up, underground urban environment that DOGS is set in. As Badou was brought up by and idolizes his brother, his skill set is similar to Dave’s, but always tempered with a kind of negativism – whereas Dave’s charisma strength lies in his being easygoing and casual, Badou’s charisma is linked more to a kind of frenetic energy, which makes people stop and stare.
In series, Badou’s strength lies in being a bloodthirsty berserker-for-hire, a very real side of him that emerges when he hasn’t smoked enough to subdue it. Without smoke (cigarette or gunsmoke), Badou is prone to wildly laughing homicidal rampages, throwing his usually close-guarded self preservation to the wind – and he doesn’t stop until he’s gotten another smoke fix, or until someone has beaten him into an unconscious pulp. Pre-series, however, he hasn’t had the mental trauma of watching his brother die and living on the (very dangerous) streets of the Underground to serve as a catalyst for this mental instability. That is not to say that, without Dave’s death, Badou does not have psychological problems underlying the lolworthy puberty rage. If Badou were pushed, signs of these as of yet latent ‘strengths’ – disregard of human life, lack of self-preservation, manic persistence in violence, severe addiction problems, and all around bad humour – would begin to display.
Other: TL;DR HE'S A TOTAL SHIT TEENAGER
Re: badou nails | dogs | unreserved
First Person: Previously played at gargleblasted, typical text post here.
Third Person: Badou, a rag-tag stray with a rust red cloth bandage wrapped around half his head, is reeling from the light.
Well, to be fair, he is reeling from a lot of things – like the sudden abduction by fuck-knows-who into what looks like a completely different world. The absence of city clamour and loud voices sets his teeth on edge, and the panic seeping from the silence soaks into his ruddy sneakers (coating old layers of fearthrillanxiety). The boy takes off the open street as quickly as his long legs can take him, seeking any dark elsewhere (anywhere but here, where it's quiet enough to hear the sprinklers on the lawns, like some kinda horror movie.)
But the light, the damn light – it's brighter than anything he can ever remember experiencing, in a run-down faded flat, with electricity bills that just don’t pay themselves. His vision, half-obscured from the start, is flickering unreliably, like a lightbulb swinging in a closet; he takes a corner into the shadows sharply, finally looking upupup from the safer vantage of (relative) dark. The one bright green reflexively snaps back down, off the unbelievable, bright speck above, achingaching (like his right eye isn't anymore, but he can't focus long enough to process it, that healed wound). He blinks, stumbles with the pain of it, covering his remaining eye with a bandaged hand. He sways, once, twice, feeling sick.
And like a gangly foal (like a gangly fool), he trips face-first into a rose bush.
"Shit! Fuckin' -- goddamnit -- !"
Is it your perfectly manicured lawn he's destroying?
OTHER
Housing Request?: 1470
Did you read the rules and FAQ?: Yep!
Would you like your application to be unscreened?: Sure.