Johnny Alpha

WELCOME TO YOUR PRIVATE CHANNEL, ALPHA. FOR SECURE COMMUNICATION, USE 618.07.154.70 *** alpha has joined 618.07.154.70 <alpha> This is Johnny Alpha. <alpha> Leave a message and I'll try to get back to you. <alpha> It might take a while. Computer screens give me a da,m headache.

< alpha > | the username Johnny usually uses
< dog > | the handle Johnny uses when he doesn't want anything attached to his name

OOC INFORMATION
Name: Gen
Contact: PM
Other Characters: N/A

CHARACTER INFORMATION
Character Name: Johnny Alpha
Age: Around his mid 30s
Canon: From the comic Strontium Dog
Canon Point: After the Stix Fix
Character Information: Character page here, General overview of the comic here

Personality:

Conversations about his past don't come easily to Johnny, who has a lot of skeletons in his closet he would really prefer to keep shut. He doesn't hide his emotions around people, as he's very quick to irritation or anger, but his deepest thoughts are something he prefers to keep to himself. His biggest secret - that he is the disowned son of Nelson Kreelman, the politician that ordered the extermination of mutants - was only revealed to his partner of 15 years and nobody else. As such, he can be quite reserved when dealing with strangers and acquaintances. He can come across as abrasive, or distant to those who don't know him, but to his friends he is highly loyal and principled. Johnny is a remarkable leader, and something about him inspires people to follow him. Whether in a war or on the run from the authorities, people have faith in Johnny to make the right choices. This is partly due to his near mythic war hero status, but also his ability as a charismatic orator, capable of calling people to arms and rallying them to his cause through strength of conviction and ideals.

Johnny's childhood was spent completely isolated from his peers, kept at home by his father, who was ashamed and disgusted by his son's blank white eyes. A minimal mutation, but public knowledge would serve as a death-knell for Kreelman's burgeoning political career built on scapegoating mutants. Johnny grew up never knowing what his eyes looked like, only warned that if he ever took his goggles off, it would kill him. But even before he knew he was a mutant, Johnny secretly sympathized with them, thinking that it was unfair that they were so discriminated against, showing that even at a young age and with no personal investment, Johnny had a desire for the world to be a just one.

One of the most defining things about Johnny Alpha is that he tries his best to be a good person. What this means for a bounty hunting mutant who kills people for a living is slightly different, to say the least. His sense of justice is very much one shaped by his own experiences - He takes the side of the marginalized, the vulnerable, and the oppressed. He will personally go out of his way to solve other people's problems, even if he has no reason to get involved, really. Search/Destroy agents have a reputation for being profit-motivated, heartless mercenaries, and although Johnny plays this up to a degree, letting people think what they want of him, ultimately he is very empathetic to people's pleas for help. Johnny went through hell, saw the absolute worst of people, and is constantly surrounded by reminders of the worst crimes people can commit, and he still believes that he can do good in the universe. From farmers being intimidated to give up their land, to the earth government secretly sterilizing mutants, he has no problem being a force of change, and considers it his personal directive and duty to balance out the injustice of the world when he can.

Johnny holds a very strong sense of personal justice, and will break laws and rules if he feels that it is in his power to change things according to his own judgement. He has no real respect or conviction in the impartiality of the organization he works for - the Galactic Crime Commission. As planetary law can vary extremely across an alien galaxy, some of these laws are dissonant with his own moral values and the task he is asked out to carry. He helped a bounty escape when it was revealed that the high treason charge was for eloping with a despotic king's imprisoned daughter, and was subjected to an obviously unfair sham trial to face execution. Not only did he rescue the mark from execution, he also killed the tyrant king and overturned his rule, despite saying that it wasn't his place to interfere. He very clearly will interfere in situations he feels are unjust, as his instinctive sense of what is right dictates. In his desire to help people, he has been manipulated in the past by highly emotional appeals, only to find out later that he was given misinformation, or on the wrong side of the conflict, as he often makes decisions guided on his emotions or gut instinct.

As part of his moral code, he tries his best to bring in bounties alive - especially if they surrender to him - but he can be quite nonchalant about killing. Anyone who shoots first is dead by his slightly faster draw. His profession bothers him remarkably little, and he justifies it as a public service that nobody else will do since his targets are violent criminals, and usually draw their weapons on him first.

Although he is emotionally stable, if somewhat melancholic, he can fall into a state where he becomes obsessive and brooding, triggered by an event he feels he needs to respond to. The obsession is usually self-destructive or unhealthy, and once he gets this idea in his head without someone to pull him out of these states, he will pursue this obsession far past a point where any reasonable person would stop. Such as when he attempted to revive a young boy who accidentally died in a crossfire by bringing his body to a necromancer despite all of the warning signs pointing no, as well as starting the Second Mutant War.

After the conclusion of the Second Mutant War, he realised the single-minded intensity in which he pursued the war blinded him to the true cost, and was highly suicidal for a while. He was prevented from acting on this by the authorities who captured him, and when he was temporarily released to track down an important politician hostage, he channeled that into a more passive form of 'I'll put myself in dangerous situations and if I die, I die' and gallows humor. Johnny has always been incredibly self-sacrificing - it's how he died the first time around, after all - but this was a shift away from selflessness to self loathing on a whole other level. Not to say that this is unprecedented - Johnny previously experienced hallucinations of his dead partner talking to him for several weeks after his death. He feels a lot of guilt for that as well.

He can be quite exacting and cruel when taking revenge on the people who have wronged him. When his partner Wulf was tortured and killed by a gang they previously put in prison, he spent months systematically tracking down the members and executing them one by one. When he non-lethally shot the leader of the gang he allowed him to believe that he had escaped, then waited for him in front of the hospital and executed him on the street. Johnny is very much capable of unnecessarily vindictive actions such as these, and considers it 'justice' that nobody else will enact, if not him. It's this role of the moral arbiter that makes some people consider him overly moralistic and arrogant.

5-10 Key Character Traits:

Empathetic
Vengeful
Determined
Melancholic
Combative
Secretive
Intense
Charismatic

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