Appearance

Joe is a fairly normal, bland-looking man, with short-cropped brown hair beginning to go grey around the temples, a perpetual five o’clock shadow, and eyes that seem to be permanently set into a skeptical squint in a face that has been creased by a difficult life. He always seems to have a lit cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth or in one hand, even in places where smoking is prohibited.

He prefers to wear simple, cheap cotton T-shirts and equally cheap blue jeans; if he has to play at being dressed up, this often simply means he pulls a button-up shirt on over the T-shirt of the day and wearing black running shoes rather than his more common steel-toe boots. Always present in one pocket, regardless of any conditions, is a small hip flask full of cheap, vile, and hideously strong liquor, which he occasionally takes a sip from at odd intervals - although observant individuals will notice that he seems to sip a bit more often when his employer, Audrey Adison, is in the area.

History/Background

Joe, unfortunate soul that he is, has been denied the touch of regular mortal luck, with the highs and lows known to common men. Where others might gamble at a slot machine and either hit a jackpot or, more often, simply lose their money, Joe will instead have the machine dispense a secret message meant for a spy who has just come in the door, or a holy relic which an angel will drop by and ask him to deliver to a location on the other side of the world in three days, lest the world be undone by some horrid evil from before time.

In either case, Joe would simply sigh, take a sip from his hip flask, and offer the entity facing him a cigarette before either turning the secret message over or looking for a phone to call his boss about yet another unplanned leave of absence. He’s quite used to all manner of wildly bizarre things coming into his life, to the point that a chorus of angels on his lawn first thing in the morning can wait until he’s done fixing himself a cup of coffee and some toast, and the presence of a thirty-meter-tall horror from beyond space and time is less important than keeping his cigarette lit. Other people mistake his attitude for bravery; Joe will be the first to admit he’s neither brave nor a hero. He’s just been faced with so much of the bizarre and unnatural that he’s become utterly numb to it. In his rare moments of good humor, he’s willing to point out that it gets hard to faze him when the most normal part of his life is going drinking with his boss, who is a vampire with fastidious tastes about unpolluted blood, his coworker, a handsomely gorgeous Fabio lookalike who turns into a fluffy pink poodle (much to the shame of the rest of the pack, who are all ferocious werewolves), and an elven princess who has a rainbow mohawk, brass knuckles, and a mouth fouler than a sailor.

Special Equipment

Honestly, he doesn’t have any. The only things he’s certain to have on him are a half-empty pack of cigarettes, a lighter, and his hip flash, usually half-full of truly vile liquor. He has these simply because his employer refuses to drink ‘contaminated’ blood; if Audrey were to ever somehow lose his need for blood, Joe would ditch his smokes and booze overnight, with no noticable effect on his appearance or attitude.

Roleplaying Notes

Joe’s entire attitude is simple: no matter what he happens to be facing, from rescuing a kitten in a tree to the rising of Great Cthulhu, he’s utterly calm, showing the kitten in the tree the same degree of concern as Cthulhu. The only things that have the ability to agitate him are running out of cigarettes or alcohol, particularly if his vampiric employer is around. His attitude is neither courageous nor suicidal, although those who don’t know him might think it is. He has, simply, not only been there and done that before, he undoubtedly gets Christmas cards each year from whatever blasphemous horror happened to be involved.

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