PLAYER: Luna
ARE YOU AT LEAST 18 YEARS OLD?: Y!
CONTACT: AppleBlossoms or PM.
CHARACTERS PLAYED: Barok van Zieks @dehallow

NAME: McGillis Fareed
CANON: Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans
CANON REFERENCE: Wiki!
CANON POINT: Post-death
CRAU HISTORY: N/A
AGE: 29 (headcanon, no canon age given)
APPEARANCE: gaze upon him
CONTRACT PAYMENT: A return to life with the guaranteed oppurtunity to kill his enemy, Rustal Elion.

QUESTIONNAIRE:
What does family mean to you and who do you consider a part of your family?
McGillis holds no idealistic notions about the concept of family. He's grown up as an orphan and there is no indication that he has any memory of his birth family whatsoever – family is not a concept that holds intrinsic emotional meaning to him. Family is the people who raise you, the people you live with, the people you are legally and financially bound to.

This leaves McGillis with his adoptive father as the only person he truly considers family. Their relation has never been 'familial' though – Iznario bought McGillis from the brothel he'd been working in as a child prostitute. From the get-go, it's been clear that McGillis was being used for sexual reasons. There is nothing paternal about the way Iznario's been treating him.

And still, McGillis consistently refers to him as father – even in his internal monologue, and even after he rids himself of Iznario's direct influence. Though McGillis hates and fears Iznario, he acknowledges his influence on his life (both materially and emotionally) in full. He will always remain his father, to him.

How do you define "success"? What is something you're ambitious about?
To McGillis, success is power. The more power you hold, the more successful you are. The more power you hold, the more free you are. McGillis idolizes the historical figure of Agnika Kaieru, a hero who once freed mankind and helped found Gjallarhorn, the organization that McGillis is now a part of. Success is Agnika Kaieru.

His greatest goal is to become a second Agnika Kaieru – he wishes to obtain ultimate power in order to reform Gjallarhorn from the ground up and return it to the original ideals of Agnika Kaieru. Or at least to his interpretation of those ideals. He feels that Gjallarhorn as it is now is corrupt and self-serving, no longer reflecting the nobility it is meant to. Given that Gjallarhorn is the highest authority in the world of IBO, McGillis' ambition is nothing less than to completely revolutionize the world.

What is the most frightening thing you've ever done? What part of you did it test the most?
McGillis would not necessarily describe it as 'frightening' in his own words, but the scariest and hardest thing he's ever done was killing his best friend, Gaelio Bauduin. As discussed in the previous question, McGillis is incredibly ambitious – his feelings of friendship were testing those ambitions. When with his friends, McGillis came dangerously close to feeling content and he perceived that contentment as a danger. If he got too comfortable where he was right then, he would no longer be able to realize his dreams.

Thus, his friends needed to be removed from the equation as soon as he set his plans in motion. McGillis was already estranged from their other childhood friend by the time he sent her to die, so that was less of an issue, but Gaelio... Until then McGillis and Gaelio had spent pretty much every day of their lives together. Honoring this bond, McGillis does him the courtesy of killing him with his own hands (well, his own mecha).

Doing so was the ultimate test of his conviction, the absolute point of no return. McGillis offered up his only true friend on the altar of his ambitions. He proved to himself that he could throw away absolutely everything for the sake of reaching his goal. And even four years later, this is shown as a sore spot for him. The self-inflicted loss impacted him deeply.

Your Faction leader, not just your boss but the leader, has asked you to carry out a hit. The target is a non-affiliated public leader, well-liked by the people of the city. Do you carry it out? Why or why not?

McGillis' response depends on a few factors here. For one, he would research the public leader. Being well-liked does not make someone a good person by default – McGillis knows very well that a lot of people who hold influence have a lot of skeletons in their closet. Should the public leader be one of those people, it would certainly tip the scales in favor of McGillis carrying out the hit.

However, the much more important factors are what ends the Faction leader is hoping to achieve by killing the public leader, as well as what reward is in it for McGillis to do the killing.
McGillis is less likely to become an assassin for the sake of the Faction leader's personal grudges – but if there is an ideological motivation or a permanent advantage to be gained, he'd be much more likely to go through with it. And if it was a matter of 'carry out the hit and your contract is fulfilled', you bet he'd kill someone for that.

So while morality factors into it a little bit, McGillis' decision would largely be based on risk-reward calculations.

POWERS & ABILITIES: McGillis has no supernatural powers. He's a regular human, albeit a very tall one. He's physically fit and a trained soldier. He's further a very intelligent individual and highly educated. Most notably, he is a mecha pilot. He changes his machines quite a bit during the series and is adept with all of them.

The one thing that is exceptional about him is his Alaya-Vijnana port. It's a coffin-shaped metal box attached to his spine and directly connected to his nervous system. When connected to a machine that is outfitted with the AV system, this gives McGillis heightened spatial awareness and the ability to use that machine with zero reaction time delay. Without such a machine, it's just a box on his spine.

SUITABILITY: McGillis deals with pretty much all subject matter covered in Jigoku-cho in canon already. He was born on the streets, experienced violence and inflicted violence, experienced sex work, and then continued to lie and murder his way through the main plot. I'd be hard-pressed to come up with any material that would come up in game that could actually shock McGillis.

FACTION SUITABILITY:
SHUTEN CLAN – Like the Shuten, McGillis values power above all – and though he acknowledges there are many types of power in the world, he has a fondness for brute force especially. His ideal world is one in which everyone can fight their way to the top regardless of coincidences of their birth – judged solely on their own power and the willingness to use it. McGillis has lived his whole life in pursuit of power, whether it is inflicting physical violence to establish dominance in his youth or rising through the military ranks in adulthood.

On the other hand though, McGillis is a snake. He is at home in the world of half-truths and lies by omission. He does not believe in honor – he will achieve his victory no matter how low he has to stoop. For that, he has betrayed his own 'faction' at home, something he feels no regret over. He has no true sense of 'honor' – he's risen from the worst slums and he knows he did not get out of there by being an upright man.
Still, he feels kinship with the underdogs of the world and his closest allies whom he didn't betray in his world were a rather mafia-like 'family' made up of oppressed teenagers.

McGillis is physically strong, though his preferred form of combat is in mechas, and he's got experience coordinating soldiers. He would thus get involved in the more enforcer-like side of Shuten business.

TAMAMO CLAN – The Tamamo Clan is a difficult but interesting fit for McGillis. Looking at him in the clan at face value, it's a return to his roots. McGillis has done sex work before, but it was in the shape of child prostitution. Bringing him into the Tamamo Clan forces him to relive that childhood trauma while at the same time offering opportunity to reclaim his agency by engaging with the pleasure district on his own terms.

In terms of philosophy, McGillis' most interesting correlation to the Tamamo Clan is his disbelief that there could be such a thing as false and true happiness. McGillis doesn't necessarily care if happiness is build on false pretenses or illusions, as happiness in and of itself is a rare precious good. His whole life McGillis has longed for freedom (cliché bird imagery included), thus the Tamamo Clan's decision to prioritize freedom as the highest value has some resonance with him.

All in all, a Tamamo Clan assignment would force McGillis to engage with the inner child that he's never truly outgrown. On the downside, this would bring a lot more potentially triggering content into active play in the game.

SUTOKU ALLIANCE – Though the other factions embody his base cravings or his previous workplace experience, the Sutoku Alliance is the faction that is most aligned with McGillis' moral compass. Born as a no-name in the streets, McGillis relates the most to the underdogs and holds disdain for organizations and groups that inherit their power from lineage only. He, too, believes that institutional force should belong to those who have the power (intellectual and otherwise) to handle it appropriately.

The Sutoku Alliance fits his scheming nature well. McGillis spends a lot of canon digging up secrets and using other people's obliviousness to his advantage. Despite respecting raw force as the highest form of power, McGillis is also a deeply studious person with a passion for books and history. He's also got trade experience – his cover identity as 'Montag' involves him leading a company.

In the Alliance, McGillis would absolutely get involved in information broking and money lending, trying to further a network of influence that he can rely on behind the scenes.

DEPARTMENT OF THE ENMA – The work of the Department is roughly equivalent to the work McGillis had been doing with Gjallarhorn in his homeworld before he turned traitor in his attempt to reform the organization from the inside. Gjallarhorn is a military organization that oversees order in the entire known world, including presiding over and sometimes mediating conflicts between nation. They are not country leaders themselves but they are the top authorities, mirroring the relationship of the Enma with the other faction leaders.
As such, the work in the Department would be very familiar to McGillis and he'd be more than qualified for it.

Morally though, he'd despise the Department. He thinks systems that only serve to uphold themselves regardless of the means, are deeply corrupt and rotten from the core. While he is not above using underhanded means (a lot), he thinks of himself as having higher goals than simply maintaining the status quo forever and ever. The Enma's idea of 'order is justice' doesn't go over too well with McGillis.

While he'd be good at doing Department work, he'd be seeking to undermine the Enma eventually.

SAMPLES

TDM Toplevel + older bonus thread