Profile

Player name: Scy
Characters played: Michael Brennan 10♠, Iollan Chives 2♠, Caleb Caustello 8♣ & Nicholas Lancaster 6♦
Character Name: Nicholas Lancaster
Age: 34
Suit/Rank: 6♦
History: PLEASE NOTE: There are mentions of abuse, rape, violence and murder in this history section. The TL;DR summary of the history is located here. Feel free to just go by the bullet points if you're uncomfortable reading the mature content. The personality section contains no graphic content.

Nicholas has a long and convoluted history before arriving at the Deck that no one knows about. He's spun so many tales that he doesn't know what he's told who, and it would be clear if two people tried to corroborate his story that he's either told one or neither of them the truth.

He was born in a small village in County Derry called Castlerock in Northern Ireland, and back then his name was Gareth Callahan. He didn't learn until much later that he was different from everyone else, but the signs were there from the beginning. He was quite daring for a child and dared to venture where no other child would go. He thought them weak, so anxious and clingy to their parents whom he considered from the beginning to be more resources than any sort of emotional support.

His world had been fine until the younger siblings came along. First a brother 2 years younger than him, then a sister 2 years after that. When he realised that their existences drew his parents' attention away from him, he took action. The brother drowned in the sea when Gareth was 6 years old. Then the parents caught Gareth trying to flush his sister's head down the toilet when he was 8. That was when they realised that he might have killed his younger brother.

Mr. and Mrs. Callahan knew that eventually their son would harm someone else, and in such a small village he was bound to get caught, so the Callahans moved to Derry city. Showing their son who was showing clear signs of psychopathy that there was more to life than rotting away in a small, boring seaside village - that was their first mistake.

They thought they could cure him. They sent him to therapy after school and when he couldn't outfox his therapist, he decided then and there that he was going to become a therapist and make exorbitant amounts of money while listening to people babble on about the meaninglessness of their lives. The signs of Antisocial and Narcissistic Personality Disorders were there from the outset. Therapy was their second mistake.

Their third mistake was, of course, letting his sister live with them. That wretched girl that was only average at school and only had three or four acquaintances - and yet she got all the positive attention and Gareth got all the negative attention. Why? He was a better performer in school than her. He could make these so-called friends in minutes. He could manipulate the teachers into giving him what he wanted. Why didn't they recognise him and his talents?

At 10 years old he raped his 6-year-old sister repeatedly for hours on the roof of the Callahan's home and then pushed her off to her death.

Now his mother and father would 'love' him, or so he thought. Invest more time with him. Tell him how much they loved him, how proud they were of him. He was their only child now - there was no one else who could take the attention away from him.

Wanting to protect their son whom they thought was going out of control, thinking that he still had a chance to turn out alright if he was given a fresh start - fourth mistake, but who's keeping count? - they sent him to childless distant relatives, Landon and Annie Turner, in Texas and had his name changed to Adam Stratford.

The Callahans' fifth and final mistake was not keeping in touch regularly with the couple to know that Landon was a violent man and Annie was an emotional wreck, broken and completely dependent on her man. There were no therapists where Adam had been moved to. In fact there was nothing except farm, farm and more farm as far as the eye could see.

Homeschool consisted of Adam splitting his attention between homework and watching Landon force himself onto Annie every day. He'd been brutal and unforgiving, but sometimes kind afterwards. That's what kept her here in this prison with him, Adam thought. That's how it works.

When Adam turned 11, Landon thought to try the same tactic on the boy. Being raped by a much bigger, much stronger man really hurt, so that night he picked up one of the shotguns lying around the house and killed him. The body disappeared into a deep hole in the ground and a report was never filed.

Annie looked after Adam until he was 15. She was a kind lady, if rather pathetic. He learned most of his acting skills from her, actually. Watching the faces she made when her husband raped her. Watching her try to placate him when he riled himself up over nothing. Watching her force a smile and learning the difference between the kind of smile that would make Landon want to fuck her again until she was bleeding between her legs and the kind of smile that would earn her a backhand and a violent beating.

From her he learned to mask his distinct Northern Irish accent with an equally distinct Texan drawl. He also learned how to take care of himself - how to cook and clean and do the chores. Most importantly, she taught him that violence and coercion isn't the only method he can use to get what he wants.

At 15 when there was nothing left for her to teach him, he put her out of her misery. He took all the money the Turners had, renamed himself this time to James Parker and went to New York City. While exploring this new city he found a cheap place to live from advertisements on university campuses and moved into a house full of university student flatmates. He had hit his growth spurt by then and could pass off as a high school dropout, and so he did and no questions were asked.

He felt a bit like the main guy in Rear Window, whatever the hell his name was, watching this house full of flatmates go about their business. There were three other guys and two girls in that house, and they had at some point all slept with each other and were cheating on each other with the handsome middle-aged neighbour and some professor and whoever else - it was all very complicated, politically, and James kept himself out of the drama.

He spent two years reading up on books borrowed with university ID cards he had stolen from one of the flatmates, catching himself up to university standard so he could get a high enough SAT score to get into the nearest institution. He enrolled in NYU in the following year.

It took him twelve years to get to where he wanted to be and during that time he's had a series of girlfriends. Half of them even survived to tell you how charming and wonderful and sexy James had been, at least in the beginning. He'd also run out of money during the course of his undergraduate programme so he earned some doing part-time jobs while studying; anything from being a waiter to a cabaret singer at a nearby burlesque club to pay the bills.

At age 30, James finally finished his PhD and became a licensed practicing psychologist. Over the course of his education he's learned a lot about his psychopathy and he knows now what people think of him, what people are looking out for when they suspect psychopathy - he's an expert now on his own 'condition', as they labelled him, and the seemingly random acts of violence gradually stopped. They can't go on if he wants to live a free man and he does want to live, despite the ever-increasing dysphoria that eats away at him.

His filming obsession also started at around the time he's managed to curb his impulses - swap one for another to stem the boredom, he supposed - and to this day he has thousands of tapes of just peoples' faces. He's fascinated with the overt display of emotions and he's used many of those tapes to learn how to act human.

When one of the flatmates discovered films of girlfriends who had showed up dead on the news some time ago, and was stupid enough to share with the rest of the flat, the flat was burned down in an unfortunate accident. James Parker became Nicholas Lancaster and Nicholas ran until he stumbled upon the Deck.

He could pass off as the perfect man that embodied any Suit of his choosing, but he went with the Diamonds. He thought most of them to be trying to hard to be pristine on the outside even though they were so ugly on the inside - he'd be right at home.

He leisurely worked his way up to 6 over the past 4 years, issuing a challenge every year. It wasn't fun when he couldn't just kill his way up to the Faces. He seems happy with 6, though. It's a good rank that still affords him some freedom to spend time Outside curing his boredom. Maybe he'll stay at 6 for a while, but. Who knows?
Personality: Nicholas is a very dangerous man, but most people aren't aware of it. What most people would consider childhood trauma, he sees as valuable life lessons he has picked up along the way. As a psychopath he struggles to empathise with others and is unable to feel emotions like remorse and guilt. That has resulted in a general lack of inhibitions with what he does and what he says.

On the job though he's very different because he's trained himself to become a very, very good actor. He's a professional man who has the reassuring smiles and nods. He doesn't interrupt people when they're talking and is comfortable with silence. He looks like he genuinely cares for everyone's plight, but on some level you know that he can't care for everyone because that would lead to him burning out on the job very quickly.

He doesn't consider himself to have very many 'friends' - the dictionary definition of 'friends', anyway - but he sees the people around him more as expendable resources. People he can manipulate to achieve his own ends. Clients are people who will give him money, who will teach him how to become an even better actor, and who will tell him all their dirty little secrets and share their insecurities that fuels his ego. He has a distorted view of the world wherein he is at the centre of it and the people around him exist to serve and please him.

There is no 'cure' for psychopathy and it's not even a 'condition' that he feels requires any sort of 'treatment'. It's just who he is - he's just different- actually, he's better than everyone around him - and what people might mistake for confidence or even arrogance is in fact the narcissism that is typical of most if not all psychopaths.

He is highly intelligent which seems to contrast with the compulsive lying and the inner thrill-seeker he tries to placate every once in a while. He gets bored fairly easily because he doesn't feel the same way everyone else does. Everything seems so bland, so dull, but the only thrills that will excite him involves putting himself and others at danger, which he has learned can compromise his standing in the Deck.

He stays, despite his restlessness, and he tries to be a good boy. Occasionally when he can't bear it anymore he will travel Outside and do something that he could get a life sentence for before running back into the Deck, but he tries not to. He really does. He tries to live vicariously through his clients, through watching movies and playing violent video games. It's just that sometimes trying just isn't good enough.
Appearance: Brown hair, blue eyes, roughly six feet tall and with that charismatic smile on his face, Dr. Lancaster looks like any well-dressed Diamond ought to. He likes the suits and ties - it's a costume he puts on that reminds him that he's trying to act like how humans 'should' act and not some mindless serial killer they think psychopaths are. Even though humans are as evil and disgusting as he is, and are capable of doing everything he fantasies about doing when the dysphoria starts kicking in again.
Character PB: Matt Bomer
Writing sample: None of what she says is really getting through to him. She seems comfortable sitting opposite from him, spilling to him everything she never could say with anyone else. She trusts him - fool that she was, to have misplaced her trust with a monster like him (his fellow humans wouldn't consider him a man if they knew) - to tell him her secrets. And he sees her for what she is - uglier than him, because she tries to hide it even though nothing compels her to. She's not a monster like him, who has been forced to pick up on smiles and raised eyebrows and wistful sighs and understanding nods just so that the wolf in warm, cosy sheepskin could blend in among them. But she's filled her life with lies and useless trinkets and becoming a monster of her own volition was surely - surely - worse than not having a choice about being born one.

No. She chose for herself this dysfunctional family and this rotten life. She chose to do a lousy job at bringing up her children (it's her fault they turned out so argumentative and so stupid; she would know if she'd seen how Nicholas' parents had mistreated him before he got rid of his brother and sister).

She chose for herself this husband who was screwing his secretary as she sat here with Nicholas and poured her heart and soul out (so miserable, so pathetic; why didn't you kill yourself when you said you were going to the last time we spoke?), blubbering with tears streaming down her cheeks and mucus dribbling into her mouth.

She likes him. He can tell. And why shouldn't she? He's single, he's got money, and he knows just how good he looks. But she's boring him regaling him with the same old stories and he doesn't really want her to give him a blowjob when she's swallowing her own mucus like this (last week was fine; she was reasonably adept at pleasuring him and she might have drooled a little around his cock but she wasn't leaking tears and mucus all over her face) but he has to keep on acting like he cares about more than how slow the seconds were ticking away.

"It's alright," he reassured her, reaching around behind his shoulder to bring a box of tissues over and place it onto the small table between them.

"You're in a safe space."
Why this Suit? Nicholas is good enough for any Suit, and he'd blend into any of them if he tried. But the Diamonds, he seems to have an affinity for.
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