The King of INDUSTRIAL

Main Event Winner!

Hall Of Fame!

Survival - 11 Wins!

Brutal - 3 Fatalities

AFFILIATION

Alignment: Villain

Team: Freelance Villain

VITAL STATS

Strength: Superior

Agility: Superior

Mind: Superior

Body: Superior

RECORD

Personal Wins: 11

Personal Losses: 2

ThePoet

It's been fifty years since this shit started. By shit, I mean Armageddon. You'll hear it called by many names, but they all mean the same thing. The Reaping, Soul Harvest, Chaos Theory come to life, the list goes on. As to how it happened, I don't have a fucking clue. One day I was Jack Richards, proud owner and operator of a small tobacco and firearms shop on the lower-east side of New York City. The next day, all this crap seemed to happen at once without warning or explanation. And as I said, it's been fifty years since it started and still no one knows why. ~ I guess I should explain what is going on right now, or this story will make no sense at all to you. First, all corpses and buried people have come back to life. Sorry and those people who were cremated, but that was their choice right? Sounds cool right? Your grandma and favorite cousin back from the dead? Well, that's a kind of cool part. But it also means every power-mad dictator is back. Napoleon, Hitler, Genghis Khan, Stalin, King Henry the VIII, and all the others out there. And of course, they were power-hungry when they died, and they've picked up right where they left off. They started carving up the world piece by piece, grabbing any territory they could. Here's the tricky part though, nothing kills them. Bullets go right through these guys and they keep walking. Launching a missile at them just means they have to walk through a crater instead of level ground. No one has figured out a way to stop them yet. All of the major governments on earth have fallen. There really is no safe place. Really pisses me off. ~As if that wasn't bad enough, whatever the hell triggered this whole mess also opened portals to different worlds. Most of them were unpopulated, just free territory for the taking, but one such portal opened to a place called Khazan City. Pretty bad news for both sides of the fence. Khazan gets to deal with the Immortal Raven, Friedrich Kammerstein, and all the other dictator-fascist-psycho-deranged-powercrazed lunatics I mentioned. Earth gets to deal with the Semi-Rational Penguin, Lovecraft, and Quietus to name a few. Yup, absolute, take no prisoners, rags to riches and back in 2 seconds, chaos. And I'm stuck right in the middle of it.

My role in this "world" is pretty tenuous, but I'll take it. I sold firearms back when things were normal. I still sell them now. I've had to expand my business a bit to accommodate these supernatural forces, but I'm still doing good business. I'm in high demand because I have great selection, I deliver, and because I'm one of the only guys doing this. And let me state this for the record, I'm in this for the money. I don't care who wins or who gets crushed into oblivion, I'm just doing this to make money and profit. Not as easy as it sounds though. ~First, since no government is really stable, currency has gone down the toilet. It's materials now. People deal in iron, steel, aluminum, tobacco, cows, anything tangible basically. I've recently stopped taking credit cards too. The companies just have too much trouble collecting from clients. A client will rack up a huge bill buying weapons from my shop on credit, and then when the card company tries to collect, the client blows them up with weapons bought from my shop. Savagely ironic, amusing to a point, but it's not amusing in my favor, so I end up pissed off and collecting from them myself. I do take some satisfaction in collecting. Not only do I get my goods back, I frequently test new products while doing it. I took my guns back from that farmer, strapped him to his barn, then fired a liquid nitrogen filled RPG (rocket propelled grenade to you) at him. What was left of him made a nice looking statue.

The Wares

     Weapons Creation: Ultimate

• Ranged Attack Only
• Area Affect
• Armor Piercing
• Target Seeker
• Multi-Attacks
• Ranged and Melee Attack

That nitro RPG was new. It was a prototype with enough nitrogen to freeze an entire city block. But that's only a small fraction of what I carry. I've got basic pistols, Uzis, machine guns, grenades, cluster bombs, carpet bombs, fragmentation mines, howitzer shells, Bowie knives, hunting rifles, hunting bows, smoke bombs, dynamite, and any other earthly weapon. But it doesn't stop there. My shop also has some uncommon, supernatural, and bizarre to say the least weapons. Holy Hand Grenades from Monty Python, vaporization cannons, polymorph pistols, and tons of other stuff. Basically if someone invented a weapon, I sell it.~ In addition to this plethora of arms, I've got a plethora of clients. Some of them are ordinary people like that farmer I froze. I've also got several noteworthy and recognizable clients. Hitler buys Holy Hand Grenades on a pretty regular basis. He's always muttering something about cleansing the world of inferior beings. Thomas Bishop stops in once in awhile for ammo and a new gun. Even Arick Huebris, the Mortician comes in pretty frequently. Never buys a gun or any heavy equipment. He mostly sticks to smoke grenades, knives, and some anti-spirit sprays. Stupid bastard killed my nice desk plant just by touching it. I would have charged him for it, but something in my head told me it wasn't worth it. I don't know for sure what these guys do with the weapons once they buy them, that's none of my business as long as they don't use the stuff on me. Bottom line is that I'm profiting big time from all this.

The Shop

     Vehicle: Ultimate

• Reinforced Defenses

Remember I said I deliver. It's my store. It's not on wheels per se, but it is mobile. I took a couple of double-decker buses and fused them together. Got some state-of-the-art engines that I'm still not entirely sure how they work. I also put some nasty armor plating on this bad boy. It can withstand a bunch of stuff like grenades, machine and turret gun fire, and most decent explosions. However, I am still trying to get the dent out from that scud attack. I guess Saddam Hussein wasn't satisfied with the nerve gas I sold him. Caveat Emptor baby. I'll get around to repaying the favor but right now I gotta fix this rig. It tilts to the right when I fly and my damn CD player won't work. The latter pisses me off slightly more than the former.

Supply and Demand

     Environmental Awareness: Supreme

There are so many war zones around here that it defies description. These battlegrounds are constantly shifting across the earth and Khazan with no detectable pattern. Then again, the wars are run by madmen so I'm not surprised. A skirmish raged in Germany for a day and then on a whim moved to Egypt. I've got no explanation, I just know it happened. That's why I deliver. I bring the weapons to the battlefield. Not too close, I don't want to end up dead. But I'll be close enough that if someone wants to by ammo or explosives, I can oblige. ~ This sector is where about 70% of my business happens. I like it because I usually charge double here. I mean, it's one thing to walk in off the street to buy stuff. It's another thing entirely to be desperate on a battlefield and needing ammo or you die. If you're calling me a capitalist, money-grubbing pig, I have to agree for the most part. It's not pig though, it's business. I don't care who wins, I care about profiting. And the way I see it, I can take all their money and leave them broke on the battlefield, but I think they prefer that to being dead.

Threads

     Body Armor: Standard

• Reinforced Defenses

Pretty standard nowadays. If you're not wearing some sort of protection, there's a nice target on your forehead for everyone to see. I personally don't wear much. It's a nice Kevlar vest, good for stopping bullets and knives. Not gonna save me from a grenade, but I have the shop for that. I rarely come out anymore. This armor is just for those disgruntled customers who come in and have an "issue" with something I sold them. It usually starts with them busting in holding a machine gun or something of that nature screaming, "You're fucking stuff doesn't work. I'm taking my money back."~ That's the point where where I pull my plasma shotgun from beneath the counter and blast them. Same concept as a shotgun, but with blasts of energy. Pretty sweet I thought. Anyhow, that's usually enough to stop them. They usually leave whimpering, wondering where they can buy a bionic arm that will replace the one I just obliterated. I don't shoot to kill, if I did my customer base would dwindle. A couple of them have even come back with nice bionic arms. They came back to buy weapons to mount on the new arm. As a humble merchant I gladly sell to them, I even throw in an extra ammo or energy clip. Guess I feel kind of guilty for shooting them. Ah well, such is life.