Baverley Marion Walton

The less-empowered types, the undecided, the morally shifty and most mundanes who get slapped around by greater powers go here by default.
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IamLEAM1983
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Baverley Marion Walton

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Name: Baverley Marion Walton
Age: 50 years old
Gender: male
Species: anthro Emperor penguin

Strengths: Walton's main strength is his opportunism. What he lacks in courage, he makes up for in his ability to recognize occasions to better his standing and to do his very best to exploit them. A seasoned liar and trained politician, he was always and still is noted for his ability to spin even the most ignominious of discharges into something praiseworthy.

His skills seem to reach especially well behind the scenes. An excellent judge of character, he usually knows when to present documents and when to fetch coffee instead, when to disappear and when to offer his contribution to the mayor's planned goals. He knows what to say to others and when to say it, turning him into Project Hope's best spin doctor for nearly all occasions. He finds ways to make the mayor's eating binges coincide with matters needing his attention elsewhere, he saves face by turning the walrus' fairly volcanic outbursts into polite disagreements.

This makes him a sort of on-the-fly psychologist with none of the recognition and an extremely compressed time window in which to make observations and assertions, and the one person who can present fairly damning refusals to the mayor in such a way as to avoid an explosive display.
Weaknesses: unfortunately, in being great at pleasing everyone, Baverley isn't the kind of guy you'd go to to get anything actually done. He doesn't quite have Wallace's git-'er-done spunk and was well known during his stint as a mayor as being someone who couldn't stand up in front of anyone. If the Commission didn't terrify him, Aldergard did. If Aldergard didn't, mundane forces of nature like Madeline Buck or the Ephesians did. Always mousey, always diminutive, always slithering in and out of cover and considering even routine press releases to be a test of his ability to endure public appearances, he honestly wasn't suited for anything other than background work.

Unfortunately, being so passive meant he could be easily molded into whatever the Commission needed. With a judicious application of payola and party contributions, Weasel, Sarvin and Winters bought their way into the penguin's head-space and could liberally add or subtract policies from the Harmony Party's platform. While this means Walton still has a few powerful phone numbers hidden away on speed-dial, he couldn't really elaborate an electoral platform to call his own with any kind of credibility. Having access to the wealth afforded by criminal intent is one thing, acting on it is another.

If anything, Baverley was a doormat the local mobsters walked across to reach the City Council. This leaves him with a double-edged sword hanging over his head. The very same thing that could come to his aid and try and oust the current and expansive resident of the mayor's office could also literally or figuratively kill him, either out of spite or lack of performance on his part.

Appearance: at five feet six inches and a hundred and twenty pounds soaking wet, this penguin isn't the most impressive fellow you'll ever meet. Despite the name of his species, the yellow streaks that gracefully line the side of his face after emerging from the dark covering over his arms and back is probably the least regal fellow you could imagine. He has the silhouette and decent photographers could give him the poise, but his fairly bowling pin-like physique doesn't invite much more than comparisons to Danny DeVito as the Penguin, in how both of them tend to waddle a bit while walking.

His features are indeed graceful, but there's a kind of uncomfortable restraint colouring everything he does, the kind of minuscule tremors you'd associate to someone who needs to pick up Decaf or who honestly needs to learn to mellow out. At best, he manages to give himself a distant, fairly professional look based on half-lidded eyes, raised index fingers and the occasional pointed cough. A little on the nasal side, you could consider his voice to be the antithesis to Wallace's, usually evoking long-suffering frustration, patient endurance, a smidgen of exasperation and maybe a dash of passive-aggressive contempt.

Generally speaking, you'll find him wearing a wide array of suits and bowties, with the slightly fluffed-up covering of his feathers giving him a falsely pudgy look. A cell phone or Bluetooth earbud receiver is a fairly common sight on the right side of his face, as is his ever-present tablet – the antibacterial and waterproof surface of which tends to double as a serving tray.
Behaviour: around the mayor or in public, Baverley tends to put up a modicum of frost and a good dose of affected professionalism. If you didn't know any better, you'd think he looks like a fairly calm, collected and decisive fellow, able to look at differing variables with a cool head and to deliver an impartial diagnosis based on what is presented to him. You'd only partially be right.

The penguin is actually a passive-aggressive bigot, as impulsive in his neutered reactions as Wallace can be precise and thoughtful even in the midst of his angriest of rages. Well aware of his inferior nature on almost all accounts, he finds no means to express his pent-up frustrations than through inane mutterings behind turned backs or shy attempts at undermining his boss' own policies from within the boardroom. While Wallace defends mundanes but sees it fitting to include other groups in the discussion (the fairly cosmopolitan nature of the police force is example enough), Baverley is very much a frustrated absolutist, stuck in a pre-Accords mindset that cannot genuinely regard vampires or dragons as equal citizens. He walks the walk and talks the talk, but a Ken doll would be more earnest towards Archibald, Matthias or Cordatus.

Considering, Wallace takes great care in keeping his second fiddle where he belongs. Some of the children of the nineties have made comparisons to Snively and Doctor Robotnik, from The Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog. The walrus is constantly poking and prodding at his helping hand, checking to see whatever devious, if clumsy attempts at treachery would be brewing behind that twisted beak. He keeps Walton afraid of his own function by pushing him to meet with those very same individuals he's terrified of on a weekly basis, and has no compunctions with leaving him to deal with envoys from the Biggs or Magi, the Winters gang or Sarvin's protégés. Wallace knows none of them would attempt something as foolish as an assault on the penguin's person – but he also knows not to tell Baverley this precise fact.

That and, frankly? Watching the poor man squirm a few hours short of a meeting with the fairly congenial Cody Tanner is entertaining enough for the walrus. Considering, Wallace takes care in order to inflate the important, if still somewhat flexible focus on protocol the city's Fae contingent requires...

Goals: living to see his fat turd of a boss choke to death at an all-you-can-eat buffet – all said quite respectfully, of course. Seeing about finding ways to tear Project Hope open and apart also seems like a fairly good idea. After all, isn't plugging yourself on a ley line supposed to give you powers? Can't you pay to have someone hexed or cursed? Considering, he wonders if Zeb Buck wouldn't be open to try and find ways to make the walrus' life a little more miserable.

It's just too bad that the local misanthropic lich can only be roused by expensive ports or sherrys, or some sort of dangling arcane carrot that could lead to his holding his son again...

History: born on the very eve of the Battle of Hope, Baverley was more or less taught from the womb not to be noticed, to avoid making a scene, to avoid making anyone unhappy. The Waltons being painfully average in every way and considering anything other than an average destiny to be far too risky, their best intentions ended up raising a shrewd mind, if a rather fearful heart.

From his childhood all the way through to his late college, Baverley espoused these fairly meek and mild notions, occasionally growing enough of a backbone to attempt not the kind of collegiate bullshittery we're all familiar with, but outright plagiarism. Between these two extremes, he fancied himself a simple financial clerk, thinking that numbers were far more stable and predictable than the dangerous and ever so volatile realm of Other People.

So, owing to his cooking the books and his affinity with the wild and wooly world of tax reports, he was able to open his own small accounting firm in a strip mall in Renton, in his twenty-ninth year. Predictably, his small business began to be seen as a fairly useful point of exploitation for someone else who'd grown up in the bulldozed ruins, but who'd espoused a much more active approach to larceny. Weasel Biggs saw the penguin as a fairly harmless outlet for his dirty money, as passing through a legitimate ledger was and still is a useful first step in the generation of clean assets. As could be expected, the penguin asked no questions and didn't let his eyes wander past the numbers.

Years passed. Mayor Horn couldn't quite adapt to the post-devastation era or to the Vienna Accords, and died of a cardiac arrest. Two years with an interim cabinet passed and Weasel began to prod at the penguin's heart-strings about trying out a career in politics.

The good old mob tactics were employed, from sending goons to vote three or four times in different boroughs using certificates issued to dead residents to not-so-subtly suggesting to those waiting in line that they place their scrawl in the right circle. The end result was the Commission earning itself an open-door policy to the city's inner workings. It wouldn't be long before certain people, notably Inspector Doherty, would notice that the mustelid had made a killing from the architectural firms pegged to use some of the Terran-Karthian materials to create new high-rises and residential complexes on the fast and cheap...

The rest, as they say, is history. The walrus lobbied and schemed as much as the penguin had, but did so on the right side of the law, taking great pains to show respect and gratitude towards the same groups the ironically named Harmony Party so openly disregarded. Within weeks of winning, however, it became apparent to the new mayor that his previous opponent wouldn't survive out in the high-stakes world of pissed immortals and disgruntled vampires looking for an explanation as to why certain mundane businesses received municipal tax breaks over others...

Wallace chose to ignore the issue for his first six months, purposefully letting the penguin stew in his own sweat. Then, quite sagaciously spotting an oh-so-convenient open spot, he gave his dear old friend a call...

Gratitude, as it turns out, forges the sturdiest of chains and the heaviest of weights. It keeps fearful meddlers in check and it saves face in the same stroke. It's fairly hard for Wallace not to consider what's happened to Baverley and not feel a stab of borderline Machiavellian satisfaction...
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