Chesterfield Act Registry of the Expressive Database
File #21 Feb 2018 03:50
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 Robert Davi |
Secaucus, New Jersey: incorporated in 1900 and, during the first half of the twentieth century, known mostly for having one of the densest concentrations of pig farms, rendering plants, and junk yards in the world. Even today, Secaucus maintains a reputation as one of the most odorous places in the New York metropolitan area, despite the fact that its blue-collar character was long ago supplanted by the mindless conformity of suburban sprawl.
It was during the first halting years of that transformation — February 4th, 1958, to be precise — that Dorothy Harkness nee Cavallini gave birth to a son. She decided on a whim to name him Francis after her late beloved dad, but her husband had other ideas. “What a fucking candy-ass name,” Gale Harkness declared not two minutes after being informed of the decision. Thirty-three and balding, he’d been forced to quit the Army after getting his leg shot off in Korea, at which point he’d turned to drink and — worse — unionization. “You’d best write down ‘Scott’ on that damn birth certificate, Doc, ‘Scott Lawrence Harkness,’ or I’m going to — “
Scott never found out what his father threatened to do to that poor obstetrician. His mother, when pressed, would only touch her lips together in that prim way of hers before telling him to run along and play with his friends. Slim and coltish, Dorothy was the very model of a dutiful housewife, a role to which she would cling even after her neighbors began burning their bras. With parents like these, small wonder that Scott still possesses a deep-seated suspicion of long hair, tie-dyed shirts, yellow submarines, and vapid flower girls coming together in meditation sessions to try and levitate the Pentagon with nothing but the power of their minds.
For the most part, the boy from Secaucus led a typical life. He played shortstop for the local Little League team, batting cleanup. He joined the Boy Scouts of America, making Eagle at eighteen. He walked onto his high school’s football team in 1976, distinguishing himself as a running back with what commentators today might call a “hard-nosed downhill style.” He dated cheerleaders, drove a battered Ford Falcon, and paired aviator sunglasses with jeans and black leather. He even managed to win his father’s acclaim — by obtaining and accepting an athletic scholarship to Rutgers University in New Brunswick, the letter from which Gale has saved to this day.
Number twenty-four entered college in September of 1980, spending most of his time on the field for the Scarlet Knights. Football was fun. He could even put up with intro calculus, history of Western Europe, and papers about Mary Shelley. Losing, though, which his team tended to do quite a bit in spite of his best efforts? Not so much. As his dreams of turning pro faded with Rutgers’ record, he soon became bored with life in the academy. One year and one semester after he matriculated, Scott quit school, taking with him a fistful of credits in the hopes that they’d come in handy once he enlisted with the United States Army: the only way for a working-class college dropout from Jersey to escape the mills, short of joining the Mob.
Uncle Sam was nice enough to fly him down to Georgia for Basic and AIT. The government even let him use the chapel on base to marry a nice girl he’d met during freshman orientation not two years ago: Emily Montaigne, Emmy for short, whose brother — also a recruit at Fort Benning — never forgave him for his transgression. But Private Harkness came to regret that decision when he discovered the location of his first post: Aschaffenburg, West Germany, with the Third Infantry Division of the Army’s Third Brigade. And not for twenty-four months, either, but thirty-six: SOP for men with families.
Scott hated Bavaria with a passion. He hated its weather — the winters weren’t cold enough and the summers weren’t hot enough. He hated its food — how the Germans could claim to have invented hamburgers, he had no idea. He hated the language — just for spite, really, as he eventually picked up a few choice phrases. But most of all, he hated the sports — for indeed, Germany was and is a land where "football" refers to a game in which twenty-two ninnies run around a field in short-shorts. And as for baseball? In 1983, ESPN hadn’t yet made it global, and Harkness found himself relying on his station’s one copy of the New York Times for the Yankees’ box scores.
After his initial tour ended, brass saw fit to grant now-Corporal Harkness’ request to return stateside. October of 1985 saw him reassigned to the 2nd Battalion of the 14th Infantry Regiment — the Golden Dragons of the 10th Mountain Division’s 2nd Brigade, only recently reactivated and deployed to Fort Benning. The next few years would be the apex of his life: in 1986, Emmy gave birth to his first son, whom he promptly named Francis; in 1987, the Giants won the Super Bowl for the first time in their history; in 1988, the Golden Dragons returned to New York, dispatched to Fort Drum as part of some realignment or other. The newly-minted sergeant went with them. At last, the Harkness Clan could be united under one roof.
But the end of the Cold War would shatter whatever dreams of domesticity Scott possessed. In rapid succession, he found himself patrolling the Sinai during the First Gulf War, overseeing Haitian refugee operations at Guantanamo Bay, keeping calm in South Florida after Hurricane Andrew, and covering the retreat of Task Force Ranger in bombed-out Mogadishu. He was posted to Bosnia as part of Operation Joint Guard; then, to Panama, after training in Army Jungle Operations. Upon his return from Central America, he was greeted with new orders: to head back to Fort Benning in preparation for the 2-14th Infantry’s rotation at the National Training Center in godforsaken San Bernadino, California.
Emmy’s lawyer served Harkness with divorce papers not thirty minutes after he told her about the move to Fort Irwin — truly remarkable speed, all things considered. He later found out that his long-suffering wife had been preparing those documents for nearly four years. Scott didn’t bother fighting for custody of his child, a decision he still regrets. He hasn't heard a peep from Emmy or Francis since.
Following the collapse of his marriage and the news that the Golden Dragons would soon ship off to Kosovo, Scott began toying with the idea of resigning his commission and making amends. Unfortunately, the attacks of September 11th changed all that. Compelled by duty, the veteran Army man returned to the ranks of the 2-14th and served with distinction in first Afghanistan and then Iraq.
It was there, in Sadr City, that he manifested his abilities for the first time. His convoy was ambushed by RPG-wielding insurgents — an attack he survived thanks only to the hole in space-time his mind reflexively created. In the confusion of a nighttime engagement, nobody noticed when Harkness simply vanished into air mere milliseconds before his Humvee’s gas tank exploded. Only after he re-materialized did he realize how doubly lucky he'd been: in the three minutes he'd spent within his pocket plane, a full five hours had passed, during which time the wreckage from his convoy had been cleared. The sergeant's forcible ejection left him bruised, battered, but alive. Upon his return to his unit, Scott discovered he was the sole survivor.
SFC Harkness might still be in Iraq now if not for another bomb: The Bomb. It was into this twisted landscape of broken buildings and irradiated ruins that the 2-14th would next deploy, M-16s at the ready, MOPP suits on — and on this last battlefield, where he saw men and women — Americans — murdered on the mere suspicion that they were Different, Scott Harkness finally acknowledged what his body had been telling him for the past five years. In late 2007, he accepted the military’s offer of an honorable discharge, and when the Linderman Act passed, he conveniently forgot to register. Senility, see. He’s approaching fifty.
Today, Harkness works as a security guard at a few local banks, working nights and weekends like many of his out-of-uniform brethren. He’s fine with the inglorious title, the bad hours, the mediocre pay, for he knows it’s not his true calling. With the help of Grace and Alistair — Chair Force, sure, but he’s learned to make do with what tools he has — he’s set up one of the most secure safehouses in the city. It’s there that the all-American boy from Secaucus defends his new charges against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and it's there he plans to stay until his services will no longer be necessary.
Scott dutifully served the Ferrymen until the flash-forward riots of 2010 when he willingly allowed himself to be captured by the Institute to buy time for his other charges to flee to safety. He spent the next three years imprisoned in a DHS holding facility in upstate New York and was eventually moved to a Connecticut holding facility prior to the outbreak of civil war. He was rescued by Hana Gitelman in 2012 and stayed by her side through the war, acting as a level head and sounding board for her strategies. Scott recognizes he's too old to be a soldier, but prides himself on being able to maintain Wolfound's growing armaments and facilities. In 2015, following the end of the war, he reconnected with his son Francis, who works as his assistant at the Bunker.
You can take a man out of the Army, but you can’t take the Army out of the man. Harkness is gruff, blunt, and crude, with little tolerance for idiocy and even less for incompetence. He doesn’t seem to have realized that he’s fifty-one and balding: as far as he’s concerned, he'll have plenty of time to sleep when he’s good and buried, and so it is that he expects his associates to display the same sort of drive. Scott doesn’t make much of an effort to ingratiate himself with strangers, nor does he try particularly hard to hide his feelings about others — the negative ones, at least. Compliments, on the other hand, he almost never throws around. Small wonder, then, that most civilians perceive him as distant, even hostile: an image that comes in handy when one’s business, as his so often does, rests upon the capacity to intimidate others successfully.
Scott remains committed to the principles of the oath he swore, particularly the part about supporting and defending the Constitution of the United States. While he’d never be caught dead using the term, he’s actually a conscientious objector of sorts, having found himself in the awkward position of defying an unjust and unprincipled act of Congress in the name of the supreme law of the land. Harkness has a clear sense of where his duty lies; at the same time, he’s by no means a martyr, nor does he intend to go public and immolate himself for the cause. A consummate pragmatist, he realizes that his arrest and subsequent trial will likely spell the end of his project, modest as it is. And so he’s resolved to stay in the shadows for now, where in his estimation he can do the most good.
Scott's Evolved ability allows him to fold space, creating a non-dimensional pocket plane with a holding capacity of exactly one cubic meter. This fold of space is nearly always nearby (see below), and he is able to transport objects in and out of it at will. He can only dematerialize and re-materialize one object at a time, and that object must be a single unit; he can't take out a section of wall, for instance, but he could take an entire wall — if it was freestanding and within the volume limit. Which, really, isn't much of a wall to begin with.
The pocket has no set dimensions. Its length, width, and depth are perfectly malleable, but its volume is never greater than a cubic meter. There is no limit on how many objects it may hold, so long as their total volume does not exceed that amount. Within the pocket, time moves at a rate of 1:100 — one second passes inside for every 100 seconds outside. Effectively, any objects stored within are in temporal stasis until Scott chooses to return them to this world.
Scott may put living things inside the pocket plane as well, but if he does so (and if the living thing is larger than a bug), it no longer moves with him. It stays exactly where that living thing was in the real world until the living thing is called back, no matter what he does or where he goes. He always knows where it is in relation to himself, so he will never lose track of its location, and is always aware of its contents. More specifically, he can think to himself "Is this in there?" and know the answer in an heartbeat, even though he doesn't automatically inventory what's inside.
In truly desperate times, Scott can even hide himself within his pocket plane, though doing so poses significant risks. He can't see outside from within his plane, and its stasis effect means he can never be sure that the situation outside is the same as he left it. As living things must re-materialize at precisely the place from which they left, the consequences should something else be occupying that space — living or dead — would be dire indeed. For obvious reasons, then, Scott has invoked his ability in this manner just once.
The range on his power varies depending on what he's attempting to transport. Smaller inanimate objects — guns, ammunition, rope, bottled water, medical supplies, and the like — he can place within his pocket plane as long as they're within his line of sight; larger ones require him to be within ten meters of their closest point. Why ten? He doesn't know, and frankly, he doesn't care: if that's how his ability works, that's how it works. So far, he hasn't been able to transport living matter on sight; to accomplish that feat, he must touch the subject's bare flesh, if only for a millisecond.
The Ferryman has grown quite adept at this sort of teleportation, to the point at which he has merely to want something inside to make it so, provided the range condition is met: the process is essentially instantaneous. However, his capacity to do so is not limitless, and continuous usage of his power will assuredly tire him out — for instance, if he attempts to vanish all the bullets fired from a machine gun over the course of ten seconds. The consequences of entering this refracted state are severe: for one hundred hours beginning from the moment of his overexertion, he loses all access his pocket plane. Worst of all, Scott doesn't know how exactly how much mental effort will cause him to burn out, although he's fairly certain the threshold is quite high. Nevertheless, the precise trigger seems to vary each time, transforming each particularly adventurous use of his power into a roll of the proverbial dice.