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Player Information
Your Nickname: Jae
OOC Journal: NONE 8|!!!
Under 18? Nope
Email/IM: anjelsword at gmail dot com
Characters Played at Singularity: Steve Rogers aka CAPTAIN AMERICUH

Character Information
Name: Karrin Murphy
Name of Canon: The Dresden Files (books)
Canon/AU/Other Game CR: Canon
Reference: The Dresden Files Wiki Entry
Canon Point: Just after Ghost Story

Setting:
OUR WORLD. BUT WITH MAGIC. Set in modern-day Chicago for the most part, with, you know, magic and monsters and crap, Kept Secret From The World (I've always wondered how the tit urban fantasy writers managed to really justify that beyond "PEOPLE SEE WHAT THEY WANT TO" but oh well). There are wizards, monsters, werewolves, other traditional Western creatures and mentions of Eastern ones as well, though they haven't played much of a part in the series thus far.

THE MOST IMPORTANT THINGS:

Special Investigations
The department of the Chicago Police that gets thrown all the shitty unexplainable cases and has to make them make sense for the big boys upstairs. It's a dead-end job, the sort of place you land in when you've pissed off too many politicians with connections, and until a few years ago it was Murphy's department. She whipped it from a pack of slackers and dirty cops into something like a functional, competent weirdness-response-team, and further injured her reputation upstairs by bringing the only wizard in the phone book on as a consultant. SI is incredibly close and familial, given their isolation in the acknowledgement of the weird, and even after Murphy was demoted from lieutenant to sergeant and the put under the command of the new lieutenant her men stayed loyal. She lost her position entirely when she went off the grid on a rescue mission without reporting in - she was gone for more than a day during a crisis in Chicago, and as a result got forced into early retirement.

The White Council of Wizards
A BUNCH OF OLD DUDES WHO THINK THEY KNOW BEST RE: MAGIC, LIFE, AND THE WORLD IN GENERAL. Murphy views them as a useless and powerful nuisance, people who talk about what needs to be done without regard for the people living in the middle of it. While he was alive, Harry fell under the jurisdiction of the Council because of the whole, you know, being a wizard thing. He was supposedly one of their Wardens, or magical enforcers, but found himself at odds with them as much as anything. Murphy does not like them. At all. Moreover, their powerbase is crippled due to a recently-concluded war with the Red Court of vampires. A war that Murphy had a hand in ending. The power vacuum left by that war has led to humongous upheaval in the supernatural world and a great deal of trouble for an out-of-work cop still determined to do the right thing, with or without wizardly assistance.

The Vampire Courts
There were four. The White, Black, Jade and Red. SUPER CREATIVE RIGHT? Now there are three, since the Red Court went and pissed off Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden which if you live in this universe is something you should know not to do. Long story short there was epic magic that they tried to use Harry's daughter for, and it backfired so spectacularly that it wiped out every last Red Court vampire on the planet. Awesome! Except for the fact that there is now a massive, huge, gaping, horrible hole in the supernatural power structure that everyone and their mother's cousin is trying to fill.

The White Court are essentially succubi. They feed off of human desire and lust, and the easy source of that is of course, sex. The nice part of hooking up with a White Court vamp? Best sex you've ever had in your life. Downside? Last sex you will ever have in your life. They are, at the moment, the most powerful of the remaining Courts due in large part to sheer numbers. That said, they're so addicted to politics and power games that they kind of knot themselves into a mass of alliances and animosities that makes it impossible for them to be of any direct use in combatting the forces that have popped up since the Red Court's annihilation.

The Black Court are your classic Ooga Booga vamps, vulnerable to most of the traditional iconography and remedies and also old, oogly, and intensely powerful on their own. But lol they went and pissed off Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden a while ago. ARE YOU SEEING A PATTERN? YOU SHOULD.

The Jade Court has only been mentioned, without really appearing at all in the books. POSSIBLY BUTCHER FORGOT ABOUT THEM.

Faeries
FUCKING FAERIES.

There are two Courts here, the Summer (Seelie) and Winter (Unseelie), though the Winter Court is the one that really matters for recent events. In order to save his daughter from the Red Court, Harry made a deal with the queen of the Winter Court, Mab - one way or another, this was going to result in Murphy losing Harry once they got back from saving his kid. Either they'd die in the attempt, or Mab would take Harry to the Winter Court to serve as her Knight, and in all likelihood Murphy herself would have been put in a position where she had to stop him somehow in the future. That's what she figured, anyway. But then Harry went and, you know, got shot AFTER the fight with the Red Court and before the farewell date that the two of them had (AFTER TWELVE GODDAMNED BOOKS) agreed to. So Murphy got outcome 3; she was first on the scene at his murder.

Other Random Monsters
There are other things that go bump in the night - werewolves (though most of them are The Good Guys), demons, ghouls, other mythological baddies.

And then there are the Fomor. These are the creepy, mysterious bastards Murphy and her people have been combatting since the end of the war with the Red Court. They've been kidnapping anyone with low-level magical powers, taking werewolves off the streets, even snagging base monsters to use for who knows what. They've started augmenting humans as well, brainwashing them into cultish loyalty and turning them loose on the streets. The augmentations melt away into water if their bearers are killed, so there's nothing for cops to go on but gang fights and typical murders when Murphy and her people put a gang of Fomor-drones down. The power of the Fomor and their people is incredible, and drove Murphy into alliance with John Marcone, the biggest crime boss in Chicago. He was the only one who had the resources to fight the Fomor and the will to back it up. For all he's a scumbag, he cares about the city in his own way - not that Murphy will ever give two shits how he cares about Chicago. He's the enemy of her enemy, but he'll never be a friend.


Personality:

Loyal and absolutely fierce when it comes to the protection of her city and her people. She’s less loyal to the law than she is to Chicago and its residents; she’s broken laws when she knows that staying within them means more people will die, and she’s bent, belabored and fractured the truth to get the resources and arrests or convictions she needs. Her relationship with the Chicago PD is tumultuous at best—she has very little respect for her superiors, and functions within the system only to keep her job and financial support for her department.

She’s passionate; her stubbornness and ferocious loyalty are both clear examples of this. She exhausts herself with it at times, refusing to give up on promises made or perceived debts owed despite the possibility that she won’t be able to fulfill them on her own. She’s loving, creating attachments with people even when she’s clearly stated that she has no interest (see her relationship with the mercenary Kincaid, whom she confesses to Harry she loves despite hooking up with him for the sex and a relationship with little commitment). She’s also—for all that she would NEVER admit it—a very maternal creature. She cares about and for people; she’s been doing it her entire life. Her career is based around taking care of others and protecting the innocent. She can’t help it: she’s a caretaker, and part of a caretaking family—even though she tends to keep them out of her professional life as much as humanly possible. It’s her way of protecting them. She took on a lot of responsibility when her father killed himself, even though it wasn’t required of her. She grew up trying to take care of everyone and then went into a career where she does the same, in which she became a leader. Another form caretaking, in a way. She almost never expects anything in return (again, see Kincaid), investing a lot more in things than she might get out of them.

When she hits critical mass in terms of emotional trauma, she goes cold. If she gets betrayed, she does the same. It takes a lot to crack back into her shell—in some ways she’s as passionate about closing herself off emotionally as she is about everything else. She’s also stubborn as hell. If she invests herself in you, be prepared to make room for her in your life, regardless of how you might feel on the subject. She’s intrusive, nosy, and occasionally overbearing, going cop on people without meaning to. Call her on it and she might back off. Maybe. Unless she thinks you’re doing something stupid. In which case she’ll probably just change tactics. She dislikes bullies, and she doesn't stand by in any given situation when there's an opportunity for her to do something about it--even when it makes things worse. That’s one of her flaws as well as one of her more endearing characteristics.

She’s an honorable person, firmly rooted in the spirit of the law, and has a clear moral compass. She’s a tarnished hero, maybe, her blacks and whites made a lot more gray by her time working with Dresden, but she still has nigh-unshakeable faith in people as a potential force for good—it’s a position she clings to in defiance of most contrary evidence. In more recent books she's not so much less guarded as more comfortable with herself as a player in the supernatural field. She has a confidence that she didn't in the earlier books due to both experience and knowledge, and while that doesn't make her more trusting, it does drive her to interact more with people on an interpersonal basis.

Trust is one of her major hang-ups. There are very, very few people in her life that she truly has personal faith in. Yes, she has faith in the concept of humanity, and when she does believe in you it’s unshakable--but earning her trust is a very difficult thing to do, and until you give her good reason to, she’s not going to open up. She’s private, keeping her issues to herself and only sharing personal problems with her nearest and dearest--Harry being the primary example, though there’s some evidence that in earlier books she shared conversations with Thomas regarding her relationship with Harry and the emotions attached to it. Her reaction to broken trust is violent and immediate; she’ll shut you down and shut you out, and probably look for an excuse to punch you while she’s at it.

She harbors a private fear of going insane, probably a result of her father’s influence in her life and his reputation as being a druggie/madman thanks to the things he saw. One of her exes accused her of being delusional, and Murphy’s never quite forgotten or forgiven that. She’s also extremely sensitive to being thought of as a weak link in any chain. While she knows and has come to terms with the fact that she’s not (and never will be) as powerful as Harry, and can’t deal with the supernatural on the same level he can, she still refuses to be a burden on anyone. It gets to the point where she might look at a helping hand (in any situation, not just supernatural conflicts) and see an insinuation that she’s weak or can’t take care of a problem herself. Being defenseless is probably one of her worst nightmares; being defenseless while her friends need her tops the list of Worst Possible Outcomes. She hates giving up on anything--perhaps a residual effect of what her father killing himself when she was young--and is tenacious in any and every project she tackles, pounding herself into getting it done or getting it right no matter the difficulty. Failure is unacceptable. She demands the same high quality of the people around her, which aggravates many and makes her plenty of enemies--at the same time, those who deliver are the ones who have helped her without fail throughout the series, and they’re as loyal to her as she is to them.

It’s in part because of all this - her strict moral code and love of the law - that she went so wrong after Harry died. The man she’s in a relationship with is the one who killed Harry, and the evidence all points to it - as Harry puts it, the cycle of frustration, pain and guilt she falls into, thinking on his death and the likely culprit, created a little seed of rage. The rage led to her first unnecessary killing, which just fed back into that guilt and frustration and self hate until she spiraled down into a place where murder was a fact of life, an ugly necessity, and if someone had to do it, it would be her. She dispensed with the judge and jury and became precautionary executioner, her old principles all intact but warped to fit a new mission; protecting Chicago from the slime that was out there and protecting her people from the ugly duty of assassination.

She’s become brutal, both on herself and others, pushing herself physically past the point of exhaustion because the big bads out there won’t give her a break, so she won’t give herself one, either. In that same vein of logic she’s started treating murder as a final solution instead of a last resort; she doesn’t have the time or energy to dedicate to rehabilitating troubled souls. Better to put down the bad dogs before they have a chance to go really rabid than fight a losing battle to turn them around. Her life is one of necessity, and from where she’s standing right now, murder is just that. Basically, she’s trained herself into a mercenary’s mindset.

Abilities, Weaknesses, and Power Limitation Suggestions: Casts bullets for competitive shooting, is an excellent mechanic (she custom-built her bike), and a freakishly skilled martial artist. No really. Her canon list of martial arts is Wing Chun, Jujitsu, Kali, Savate, Krav Maga, Tae Kwan Do, Judo, boxing, and Shaolin Kung Fu, though her primary is Aikido. She's a ninth dan and used to teach it, though I don't think she does any more. She's a squishy human, so I don't think power limitations are necessary.

Inventory: Jeans, loose shirt, leather jacket, and a custom-made bullet proof vest that layers kevlar and chainmail. Two .40s in shoulder holsters, a .20 in a boot holster, a .9mm in a holster at the small of her back and a utility belt stocked with ammo and butterfly knives.

Appearance: Five-foot-sneeze, blonde, blue-eyed, ripped and often described as looking like someone's favorite aunt.

If your favorite aunt was capable of breaking your face with one hand. Visual reference.

Age: 35


Samples
Log Sample:
She knew this job would be trouble the moment she walked through the door. Never mind the fact that she really wants to know a) how one gets a giant squid onto a space station and b) how a chocolate lumberjack sculpture ends up in its tank - Murphy has to think it would be easier just to get a new chocolate lumberjack sculpture.

What the ad for the job didn't mention? The fact that the thing is life-sized.

This could even be worse than the time she had to help track down a supposedly haunted replica of James Dean's car, stolen from a memorabilia tour and spelled into killing whoever touched it. It wouldn't have been that bad, probably, if Dresden and Thomas hadn't been going back and forth with East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause jokes until they found the car and its thief in segments wrapped around three different trees.

She scowls at the tank in front of her, scowls at the smiling face of the Paul Bunyan-esque edible art settled in sea-frond tranquility on the other side, and says, "Fuck my life."

Some day, some day she would love for a job to be easier than expected.

Clearly it is not this day.


Network Sample:

[A short-haired, scowling blonde blinks onto the feed.] Karrin Murphy, formerly Chicago PD, from the year 2011.

This is the part where the rage-fueled typesetter shows up and tells me no one gives a crap, right? Yeah, I did a little backreading. Not my usual kind of weirdness, but from what I gather, there are people working on the problem. Let me know if you need any muscle. Science isn't my forte.

[The scowl goes thin and strained for a second.]

Do have one question. Where can I find the guy calling himself Harry Dresden.