Nicholas Flaherty was a character created for a message-board role-play game titled Hunter: The Reckoning, which was in turn based on a game called Hunter, for the Playstation 2. I was unaware of this at the time I signed up, and remained so until several weeks after the game died, when I was rummaging through a friend's game stash in search of good two-player material.
In the game, all Hunters are known by both a classification, or Creed, and a call sign. Creeds range from the Avengers, the typical hothead; to the Martyrs, who provide support to their allies, often at the cost of their own person; to Innocents and Redeemers, who tend to side with the beasts their counterparts hunt and are capable at times of restraining their brethren if they deem it necessary. Nicholas was a special Creed developed by the game creator: a Wayward, totally obsessed with destroying the abominations through whatever means necessary, with little care for anything or anyone else.
I omitted the Creed from the narrative because the role-play was based heavily on game-like concepts, and I tend to prefer working from a real-world perspective where people aren't necessarily defined or care about classifications, and because adding it in would seem too much like I was setting up a character in an RPG. However, that Creed plays largely in Nicholas' mindset, so I felt it at least worthy of mentioning.
The flashback near the end is a reference to my sign-up for the game, where I was required to detail the events that caused my character to "awaken" as a Hunter, and because of the intense and specific nature of the character's psychology, I felt the need to justify such traits with an event appropriately graphic and scarring. As I warned a friend while posting it, while I don't buy into gratuitous graphic content, neither do I pull punches.
Part of Nicholas' psychosis is his obsession with the Knights Templar. When I was creating him, I had been wanting to play a Christian character for quite some time, and with Nicholas I wanted to add a twisted, almost fallen aspect to his faith. Those who have read any of Jim Butcher's The Dresden Files may notice subtle influences from his character Michael Carpenter, a Knight of the Cross, but where Michael is an upstanding man empowered by his faith (for which I rather applaud Butcher, myself) and wields a sword (Amoracchius) made powerful with it, Nicholas uses his faith to justify his actions, often misquoting scripture to that end, and his weapon is plain and ordinary. I would not have actually included a sword in a modern-day creature-killer game since it is rather cliche, but in Nicholas' case it fits, since he believes he is the resurrection of the Templar order and so carries the sword as sort of a solemn duty.
Including the sword actually made writing the sketch more difficult. In order to feel like I was doing it justice, I decided to look up, watch, and familiarise myself with some longsword battle sequences, and spent about two hours studying YouTube videos of basic stances. I also went outdoors once or twice and went through most of the motions with a large yellow broomstick I have, in order to be able to actually describe what Nicholas was even doing. That took several hours as well, since I had to first work out as best I could the correct footwork, mostly from visual memory but occasionally from logic.
As part of the game, each player was required to make a list of abilities their character possessed; the Edges I referenced. The concept felt so much like a video-game deal at the time (remember I didn't know it actually was) that I immediately balked and left myself with a short list, going so far as to combine three listed abilities into one and having only two. I have a few characters whom I have deliberately overpowered, and for reasons I hope justify my decisions. Nicholas Flaherty is not one of them.
The narrative itself was mostly inspired by Saliva's song "Click Click Boom", and is based off of the imagery I initially developed as my original sign-up. After I had watched it for about a day (I tend to delay all my writing this way, so I can get a good feel for it), I had decided that such a setting would work better after Nicholas was already a Hunter, and discarded it. "Click Click Boom" revived the imagery for me, and since it was interrupting my work on another sketch, I decided to go ahead and run with it.
Naming the sketch was actually rather difficult. I have run through at least seven names for it, and I am unsatisfied with its current title, which is Latin roughly meaning "undefeatable". It works as an invocation/battle cry, but as a title is rather . . . meh. And yet I can think of nothing else that fits. Wayward makes no sense, Undefeatable is even worse in English, Click Click Boom doesn't work because Nicholas hadn't even developed an attachment to the phrase yet (he did later), etc., etc. Naming things often irritates me. I think it's because I can't be content with a name unless I feel it's the best I could come up with, but at the moment I am at a loss here.
Anyway. Now that my head is clear, I can get back to the sketch I wanted to work on in the first place. I hope you enjoyed it.
Oh, and I still need to get on Adam to see about putting Edit buttons on these posts so I can move a couple over to Ether. Made the third world for stuff I write that has no relation to Veridan, since I think I'll keep this one for random crap.
Yay rambling.
