Name: Blaine Frazier
Gender: Male
Age: 57
Nationality: Republic
Zoid: Gun Sniper
AIM: BlackOrpheusSSDD
Personality:
Blaine, being a retired soldier, has an incredible sense of discipline, and can’t stand people messing about or disobeying his orders. This tends to make him rather angry and he can lash out when in this angered state. Other personality traits he picked up as a soldier were a very high level of perceptiveness and an excellent sense of danger evaluation. He is accurately able to recognize potential dangers, and assign them danger levels.
Because of his military background, Blaine is a gruff and harsh sort of man at first, hardened by the things he has seen and done in war. First appearances would make it seem that he is a cold and heartless sort of person, and this is shown in the ruthless and clinical way he goes about the task of managing the Vagrants. When first meeting someone, Blaine will act very standoffish, ignoring the person until he has had time to determine an accurate idea of the person, at least to his mind.
As stated, Blain is not one for foolishness, and he hates watching people act childish and treat things like a joke. He treats most things with a seriousness that many people would say is unhealthy, and he often gets told to lighten up. When this happens, Blaine usually replies by decking the person who spoke to him, or by revealing the stump of his left leg, which tends to shut people up.
When people do treat things like a joke, Blaine finds that behaviour incomprehensible at some times, or rationalizes it at other times, if he’s feeling a bit more mellow. Normally though, it confuses and irritates Blaine to the point where he will make snappish comments, snide remarks or occasionally a loud-voiced shout. Blaine even shouted at a class of six-year-olds once, just after the war had finished, though this was put more down to post-traumatic stress disorder.
Once you get to know Blaine, and assuming you are still in his good books, he will soften up a bit, and treat you more like a buddy, especially if you are between thirty and sixty and are male. Some people theorize Blaine has a ghost of an attachment to his comrades who fell in battle, and subconsciously treats men of that age group like good friends for that reason. Once appeased, Blaine actually gets quite jovial, cracking the occasional joke, but more often than not throwing out teasing insults to friends and foe alike.
Blaine was part of a Republic reconnaissance unit in the late stages of the war, and for this reason he has excellent logical and deductive reasoning, and an eye for details, along with the big picture. Extrapolating and making guesses from fragments of information has never been difficult for Blaine, and he uses this ability to his advantage to work out many a secret about people around him. Also inherited from his time in the military was an incredible sense of precision and skill, and lateral thinking.
While Blaine was in the war, he lost five good friends when Shadow Unit Charlie was ambushed, and he’s never really recovered properly from this event. He has mental scarring that causes him to be jumpy around loud noises, and he is terribly racist, hating both the Trillstani and the Imperial population. It’s an irrational racism of course, and he knows that, but he hates them nevertheless, and loathes working with them.
After the war, Blaine developed a terrible case of post-traumatic stress disorder, and went into relative isolation for a while to give himself over to his thoughts. When he came back, a new injury marring his body, his mind was relatively at peace, but piloting a Zoid still stirs him up emotionally, so he tries to avoid it if he can at all manage it. If he is forced to pilot his Zoid, Blaine will break out into a nervous sweat, painful memories will dredge themselves up, and he can sometimes freeze up, requiring coaxing from his daughter before he feels ready to do anything.
Background
Blaine Frazier was born in the year NC 35, in New Helic City, just as the First Great War of the New Century was drawing to a relative halt. A new age was dawning, and Blaine was part of it. As a child he was well loved and nurtured, cared for and fussed over like any child. His father was a taxidermist (yes, there are taxidermists on Zi), and his mother a teacher’s aide. Together, Blaine’s parents raised him as well as they possibly could, and loved him very much.
Blaine was an energetic child, who loved making noise, romping around and pretending to be a Rev Raptor, his favourite Zoid at the time. This was mainly because the main character in a cartoon was a talking Rev Raptor, but that’s beside the point. Like most children in the Helic Republic, Blaine started school at six years of age, and went through primary school life confidently and competently, generally passing with a ‘B’ average. As he grew, Blaine made friends with a group of boys very similar to him, fun-loving and interested in getting into mischief.
Blaine got his first taste of his early future when he graduated primary school, and there was a class party. Blaine was twelve, and in his eyes a man, so he didn’t hesitate to drink some alcohol one of his less mature friends had stolen from the family liquor cabinet. Of course, that didn’t make Blaine an alcoholic, but it got him started on his rebellious streak. Throughout his life Blaine had felt that his energy was being repressed and as he hit puberty that funny little thing called hormones set in, overclocking his brain’s impulsive acceleration. Sadly, humans don’t develop the skills to stop those impulsive thoughts for a good ten years after the hormones kick in, so this left Blaine plenty of time to get into mischief.
Blaine became one of the jocks of his school, being ‘cool’ and tough, doing things that were considered cool, like smoking behind the sheds, and secreting alcoholic beverages to school. Of course, attending wild parties was also a prerequisite for being cool, and he did this with much glee. His parents, being supportive of his ‘needs’ and all new-age, basically let him do whatever he wanted, within reason, so he went to many, many parties. Some of them he didn’t drink, most he did. He lost his virginity at thirteen and has had many a girlfriend over his teenage years.
When Blaine turned sixteen, he threw rather a large party in a club in the center of town. Heaps of people came, and it was all good fun. Dancing, coloured lights, music that would have shocked the older generation, and plenty of hormonally-charged action. Oh, the hormones… how they taunt Blaine. Being that he was turning sixteen, Blaine found it a good enough reason to get more plastered than usual, and became very, very drunk. He also started to get very, very jealous. He always had been protective of his girlfriends, and at this party he was sure that one particular guy was sizing up his current girl.
When Blaine told the guy to shove off, a small scuffle broke out, until the other boy challenged him to a race to see who deserved Blaine’s girlfriend more. Blaine agreed, they headed outside, and jumped in their cars. The race was to be a drag race, in a sense. The boys drove down a long, kilometer-length strip of road that was split in a crossroads. Whoever reached the intersection first would be the winner.
So the race began, and the two drunk kids raced as fast as they could towards the crossroads. It was intense, but Blaine was determined to win. The crossroads was approaching, and Blaine was just ahead. What happened next is a little cloudy, but one of Blaine’s friends explained it as “Red light. Cars came the opposite way. Blaine didn’t stop and… yeah. Smash and burn baby…”
Blaine ran the red light, determined to win, and slammed into the driver-side door of a car coming along the other road at around 200 kilometers an hour. The other driver was killed instantly, but Blaine survived. He had been a good boy, and was wearing his seat-belt. He got a few broken ribs, and a bruise to the skull, but nothing more. After all, the car he’d been driving had been a big hulk of a car, with a big bullbar on the front. He was taken to hospital and treated, and a week later was taken to court, charged with speeding, drink driving, underage drinking, manslaughter, negligent driving and to top it all off, running a red light. Blaine was found guilty of all the charges and was sentenced to thirty years in jail, reduced to twenty-five due to being a minor. The first twelve years of that sentence was to be a non-parole period.
Blaine was taken to juvenile detention, and spent the next two years there. It came as somewhat of a shock to the system, as he was no longer the big kid, he was no longer allowed to do what he wanted, and in general, his life was now ruled by discipline. He had set hours to do set things, and he hated it. But two years of that discipline will do things to a man, and Blaine was no exception. When he turned 18, Blaine was moved to a minimum-security prison, where the same discipline came into effect.
Then, at age 23, the Geno Trio assaulted the Republic, and soldiers were needed to help with the war effort. Expendable soldiers, and soldiers who had nothing to lose and everything to gain from being an enlisted soldier. In other words, prisoners. Blaine was conscripted to a small task force on the coast of the Central Continent, and trained to be a soldier. Blaine was trained to pilot small anty-infantry Zoids, to fire weapons and to kill. At the end of his training, he and five other people from his taskforce were assigned as a small escort and reconnaissance unit attached to an infantry brigade. The reconnaissance group was codenamed Shadow Unit Charlie. Their tasks were to be the shadows that discovered potential dangers and ambushes, and to be part of the main infantry force when the full-scale assaults were made.
Blaine was part of the war for five years, and was excellent at what he did. He managed to survive the front lines, and was chosen as the tracker/trailblazer for Shadow Unit Charlie. The efforts of Shadow Unit Charlie allowed for a massively successful assault by Republic ground forces against the Empire, and for this the unit was assigned as an escort force to an important convoy. The convoy was carrying much-needed ammunition and mechanical assistance to forces in the north, and Shadow Unit Charlie operated as the escort, stealthily surveying the surroundings. They were provided with three jeeps, mounted with anti-zoid rifles, and a single Gun Sniper, for long range support. Blaine was assigned to the Gun Sniper, if only for the reason that he was the most steady shot of the group.
Shadow Unit Charlie was moving through a deep valley when the disaster struck. There was an attack force waiting to ambush the convoy, and the trap was sprung on Shadow Unit Charlie. The ambush force, being prepared to take out the convoy, consisted of an Iron Kong Mk.II and three Guntigers. More than enough to take on three jeeps The Gun Sniper Blaine was in was further away, in a sniping position, and it was only this that saved it. Because it was so far away, the Iron Kong leading the ambush sent the three Guntigers to handle it, saving itself for the convoy. In effect, Shadow Unit Charlie was ripped to parts. Blaine was the only one of Shadow Unit Charlie to survive. The Guntigers hunted him down and they fought viciously, until he managed to find a strategic retreat route. He escaped with a badly damaged Gun Sniper, and returned to Republic territory, after calling the convoy to a retreat. The journey took five days, five horrible days with a mangled, torn up foot. Blaine could tell, even without any medical expertise, that it would have to be amputated.
Blaine eventually made it back to a Republic outpost, and was cared for and nursed back to health. As expected, he lost his foot, and the rest of his left leg below the knee. He had other scars marring his body, and many more scars that tore across his mind. Those scars were not likely to heal anytime soon. Blaine remained at the outpost for the last two months of the war, assisting where he could, and gradually repairing his Gun Sniper. He’d come to hate the thought of piloting the Helcat, but he repaired it in memory of his fallen comrades.
When the war ended, Blaine was awarded a medal of valor, and his comrades received posthumous awards for bravery. Blaine returned to civilian life, vastly changed by his experiences of prison and war. He became a realist and a cynic, and gravely depressed. This depression lasted for a few months, until he met Julie Bauer, a beautiful young woman. They fell in love, and became engaged. Julie and Blaine were married when he turned thirty one, and two months after the wedding, Julie fell pregnant. She gave birth to a beautiful baby girl, who they named Natalie.
When Natalie was twelve, Julie was forced to move back to her mother’s home, as her mother had been diagnosed with a terrible illness that required constant attention. Natalie stayed with her father, and Julie comes to visit them regularly. However, now that Julie was not working, Blaine’s war pensions were not enough to look after the three of them. So Blaine found a job in an executive office, doing management paperwork for the ZBC, keeping track of the files for various Zoid teams. Recently, he started up a Zoid team of his own, looking to try and shake his fear of piloting, and also to please Natalie, who had always wished to be on a Zoid team. He named the team the Vagrants, as a reminder of his teenage years, and has devoted one day a week to working with other war veterans.
Description:
Blaine is a large man, a very large man indeed. He stands at 6 feet and four inches tall, and is very well built. He has well defined muscles and a toned body, but all that extra muscle has reduced his flexibility. He has broad shoulders and hands that are rough and calloused, from his years working in prison, and during the war effort. Because Blaine is Republic in heritage, he is Caucasian, with lightly tanned skin. His tan has been fading for a long time, due to increasing hours in the office, but he maintains a slight tan, at the least.
Blaine has sandy brown hair, streaked through with a peppering of gray in his middle age. His hair, which used to be in a crew cut, is now worn long, so that it hangs just above his eyebrows and around his ears. His large, almost almond-shaped eyes are deep green, and his nose is crooked, a relic from a long ago fight. He has a small, faint scar on his left ear, and usually goes unshaven for a few days, resulting in stubble. Normally he wears a small necklace around his neck, a pendant with five names inscribed on it.
Blaine walks with a slight limp, not overly pronounced, but enough to hamper any running skills he may have, and the like. This is because of the plastic prosthetic leg he now wears below his left knee. Because of his prosthetic limb, Blaine always wears long pants, whether they be suits, jeans, cargo pants, or even old-style military camo pants. He also usually wears a tank top of some dark colour while not at work, and comfortable shoes, usually sandshoes.