Application for Tu Shanshu

[neverleftharlan]

Player Information:
Name: Jae
Age: 25
Contact: via PM
Game Cast: Steve Rogers

Character Information:
Name: Raylan Givens
Canon: Justified
Canon Point: Post-season 3
Age: 42
Reference: Justified's wikipedia article

Setting:

Our world, plain and simple. Raylan is a Deputy US Marshal, and has served in that capacity for 19 years. The primary function of the US Marshal Service is to track and detain federal fugitives, though they also deal with issues like human trafficking and interstate crimes, transportation of prisoners, witness protection programs, and serving court documents. They're responsible for the protection of court officers and buildings as well. The office of U.S. Marshal is the oldest federal law enforcement office in the United States; you can see the pride in that reflected in the characters who staff the USMS office in Lexington, Kentucky. It's a small office, and as a result is perpetually busy; one of the most violent districts in the United States falls under their jurisdiction.

Harlan County is Raylan's birthplace, where he was raised until age 19 when he ran away from home, got his college education, and got himself a place in the marshal service. It was part of ground zero in the historical conflict between the Hatfields and the McCoys, and is a primary source of coal within the U.S. Its history is checkered with coal miner strikes and brutal corporate retaliation, and Raylan himself lived through several strikes and confessed to being beaten by thugs hired by one company when he was a boy. Harlan is a dead poor, fiercely prideful place, with the insular personality and suspicion of those who have been historically abused by carpetbagging opportunists. It's a bastion of deep southern poverty, home to moonshiners and coal miners. Criminality runs rampant, and it's pretty much impossible to get by without at least paying protection money to keep the "protectors" from robbing your home. Most are involved in some kind of low-level criminal enterprise. It's racist, classist, with clusters of "hollows" making up the landscape of clapboard houses and crumbling farms. The only reliable form of employment is the coal mines, which - to paraphrase a song - is like digging at the bottom of your own grave. If the cave-ins don't kill you, the coal dust will. Harlan living is a badge of pride for all of those who manage it, and those who "make it" have the odd honor of being held in esteem for their self-made success and contempt for their supposed abandonment of home and family.

Raylan's own world consists of the few people in Harlan who still know him well and speak to him often - including Boyd Crowder, the unofficial crime lord of Harlan County. Boyd and Raylan dug coal together as young men and survived a cave-in together. They established a tumultuous friendship that's persisted into their adulthood, where they stand at opposite ends of the law and are as likely to point a gun at each other as shake hands on a given day. This conflict, and Raylan's close ties to Boyd and Harlan County, serves to create many of the violent entanglements throughout the show.

Personality:

He's always been smarter than strong, but whether it's because of the way his father treated him or because of what's expected of people from Harlan, he's never thought of himself as intelligent. Never mind the fact that the hunches he follows in investigations nine times out of ten lead to arrests (or shootings), never mind that he's often a step ahead of his colleagues in parsing out the tangles of day-to-day mysteries and organized crimes. He's lucky, or in the right place at the right time. One of the reasons he looks up to Boyd is the man's intelligence - Boyd is a genius, and in another life could have made a life for himself in the wider world if he'd had the chance. Raylan is able to keep up with Boyd, just behind him, like Watson to Boyd's crooked Sherlock. He'd never see or put it in those terms, but it's why he can't ever quite cut ties with the criminal. Boyd was the only person in Raylan's young life who was smarter than Raylan himself, and the only one who didn't make him feel stupid for being smart.

Raylan has been a deputy marshal for nineteen years - in other words, he's in the same place after two decades as when he joined up in his twenties. Those who've served as his chiefs can attest to the fact that he's good at his job, utterly dedicated to the position - and would be a total disaster in a supervisory station of any kind. Raylan's dedication to the job comes in part from the fact that it gave him a life. It gave him something to do, something he was good at, and it kept him from sliding into a life of criminality or digging coal, which were the only futures he saw for himself in Harlan. He gives the job everything because he owes it everything - which results in a distinct lack of friendships or lasting romantic relationships. He's not heartless, not by any means, but he's thoughtless and awkward and always puts personal ties aside for the job at hand. He has an almost compulsive need to do the right thing, to the point where - when he had to choose between his relationship with his ex-wife and saving a girl down in Harlan - he chose to go after the girl he'd known for a handful of months instead of staying safe with the woman who was pregnant with his child. He loves people with everything he has. It doesn't leave a whole lot for himself, and he doesn't really understand what happens when you forget to tend to your own affairs. He barrels through life like a tornado, and it's only in looking back that he sees the damage done.

He's always polite, unless he's being magnificently rude, and the latter rears its head with great frequency around stupid people or people who treat him like he's stupid. Or criminals. Always around criminals. He's a consummate flirt and utterly incapable of keeping it in his pants when the invitation is given. But he asks before he enters a person's home and insists that others do the same, tips his hat to women and superiors, and even when picking fights tends to do so with a gentility that takes his opponents off-guard. He fancies himself a lawman of the Old Western strain, ruthless and respectful without an inch to give to those who break the law. His facade is convincing enough that he even fools himself - in the very first episode, it takes him by surprise when his ex-wife declares Raylan might hide it well, but he's the angriest man she's ever known.

It's true, he wears his upbringing on his sleeve. He has all the pride in poverty and scorn of wealth that comes with it, but more than that, he has rage. The rage of the impotent against the powerful. It's not just his feelings about power companies, or the way the educated manipulate the uneducated - it's the overall rage of the abused. His father beat his mother and Raylan himself, wasting the family's money and garnering a reputation in Harlan as a career criminal. Raylan hated everything his father chose to be. Hates it. A part of his choice to become a member of law enforcement comes from his desire to distance himself from his father's legacy, to usurp the expectation that he'd fall into step with the lawlessness of his home county.

His young life was one of pervasive injustice, filling him with a visceral and at times hypocritical hatred for those who step outside of the rule of law and decency. He frequently bends and breaks the rules for causes he finds just, and his moral compass wobbles but still aims north - but woe betide to those who cross the lines he sees in the world. One thing you can always bet on is that Raylan will keep his word. If he promises to protect you, he'll die before he sees you hurt. If he promises to kill you, he'll kill you. A man only lives one life, and he'll only be remembered for the things he does in it. Raylan doesn't hesitate to shoot and only shoots to kill - in all the shootings that take place in the show, he only twice that I can recall intentionally wounds an individual, the first time being his own father, the second being a man who doesn't want to be arrested and put in prison. A man who Raylan wants to see suffer at the hands of the system. No matter how much he might like, respect, or even enjoy the company of some of the people he hunts during the show, he always adheres to the letter of the law when bringing them in. He's a man of great personal honor, regardless of whether or not he's seen objectively meritorious. If he can sleep at night, he feels like that's all a man can ask for in the end.

His reaction to Tu Shanshu will not be a good one. He won't believe it, or will declare that he doesn't even after he starts to. He might try the door-kicking investigative style that serves him well enough in Harlan, will no doubt pick fights with the locals, and will have a very hard time adjusting to the idea of any kind of work that isn't with the marshal's service. He's a lawman. He practices the enforcement of law. It's the one and only thing he's good at, aside from shooting, and he won't even be able to do that once he's out of ammo. He'll feel useless and will do everything he can to avoid feeling useless, which will doubtless end badly for most involved.

Appearance:
6' even, dark eyes, dark hair starting to gray at the temples. He's undoubtedly handsome, perpetually has a five o'clock shadow, and dresses either in flannel or business casual or possibly a suit jacket with jeans.


Abilities:
Detective skills and a dead shot with a sidearm. He taught at Glynco, the USMS training center, so presumably he has a level of skill with all standard-issue firearms used in the service.

Inventory:
- Sig 226 .9mm
- Glock 22 .40 caliber
- M1911 .45 caliber
- Jeans, t-shirt, flannel overshirt.
- Badge and star, wallet with ID, cash, and a sonogram inside.
- His hat. A well-worn white Cattleman's Stetson.

Suite:
Earth Sector. One room. He's barely ever had more than that in the show, and wouldn't know what to do with it if he did. He's also a very Earth-type personality, and would feel more at home there than pretty much any of the other options.

In-Character Samples:
Third Person: Spoilers for S. 3

The night that Winona left him (with a note, two lines blunt as a hand-me-down pickaxe), Raylan didn't drink.

Lord only knows it wasn't through lack of effort. He poured himself a whiskey, left it in the bedroom. Opened up a beer, left it in the bathroom, by the mirror, where he wouldn't go back for it. So it went for about an hour, him stationing soldiers around the house and leaving them to their posts as he returned to the note. Turned it over and back. Held it up to the light. Like the way fluorescents marbled through printer paper would tell him something her tidy letters didn't.

Eventually he found himself on the couch with the sun idling up on him through the windows. It was a Kentucky spring sunrise, wetting the world in greens and dandelion yellow. Raylan had mentioned green as a color for the baby's room - nice and neutral, no arguments about color-coded sexism and subconscious signals being sent to a fragile young mind. Though no child of Winona's would ever be fragile enough to let something like a color influence their state of mind.

By the time he gets up it's time for breakfast. He has a warm beer instead, drinking the one he left closest to ground zero. He's listening for her to get up. Waiting for her to start the shower so he can slide in beside her. Run fingers over curves warmed by pouring water.

He goes to work without a shower, scrubbing his face and neck and arms in the kitchen sink. After quitting time he'll find another place to stay. This was always ever Winona's house, and now that she's out of it, it belongs to no one.

Least of all Raylan Givens.

Network:

[On comes the video, with a handsome man in his early forties, wearing a Stetson, staring it down with the kind of suspicion typically reserved for interrogations.

And for about ten seconds that is all he does. When he speaks, it's with a thick Kentucky accent.]

I suppose, now I'm thinking about it, using this means of communication is an acknowledgement of sorts that this is in fact happening and I am not higher than a summer kite or having a trauma-induced hallucination of some kind. S'funny, I didn't figure myself as the type, but I suppose one never does.

I'm going to find a drink. Somewhere in this… [A pause that stretches long enough to indicate he's at a loss for words.] Extremely creative venture into the deep recesses of my apparently traumatized psyche. Because god knows if I'm in my head, there's got to be a puddle around here somewheres.