Barney Marsh

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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Barney Marsh

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Name: Barney Marsh
Age: 201 years old
Gender: male
Species: Servitor

Strengths: before his supernatural abilities are considered, Barney's time-honored sleuthing skills have to be taken into account. Hope has its fair share of independent investigators and private eye agencies, but Barney is perhaps the oldest active P.I. in town – oftentimes operating in the margins of the HPD and Shield's jurisdictions. If a client would rather certain cases remained private and well away from the public eye, his services come complete with an extra layer of secrecy that couldn't be afforded by leaving the matter in publicly-sanctioned hands.

On the other hand, this means Barney's methods can sometimes prove to be unconventional. Without a code of ethics to stick to or any sort of personal deontology to mention, he's free to take to his accepted cases with much hard-boiled immediacy as you'd imagine. Things might have gotten a little more tight since the Vienna Accords were ratified, leaving him unable to skulk around Sandhill as much as he's used to, but his brass knuckles and fairly raw and dirty fighting skills still see some use.

Concretely, this makes Barney out to be a physical opponent who lacks in finesse but makes up for it in pig-headed endurance. Brass knuckles and a Smith & Wesson Chief's Special tend to be his scrappier tools of the trade, alongside the expected notepad and mechanical pencil. Having taken more than his fair share of beatdowns in the past, he's not afraid to leave unsuspecting mooks a wide margin. That is, as long as he gets to pull it away from them at the last possible second. Thankfully, his first notable ability includes a slow, if effective set of regenerative capabilities. Loosened teeth grow back over a few days, black eyes take a few hours, and anything life-threatening can be expected to heal in weeks, provided the required medical attention is on offer.

Otherwise, his species is notable for its rather Eldritch ability to use any source of water, natural or man-made, as a thoroughfare. Essentially able to dissolve himself into any puddle, clothes and all, he then gains the ability to control the patch of water he's invaded, or to hitch a ride within bigger currents – from sewer mains to the Hillard, and even some of the close currents that surround the isles. As could be expected, he becomes impervious to physical harm if allowed to exist in liquid form.
Weaknesses: of course, anyone who takes weeks to regenerate is still perfectly vulnerable. He's well aware that any goon worth its salt would only need to wound him sufficiently to stick him in Intensive Care, at which point they'd have days to stroll in, concealed carry in tow, and dispatch him. Even without that in mind, his vital organs are still very much vital, with any sufficiently disabling hit resulting in assured death.

If all this means he's built up a resistance to pain, being a bit inclined to push on despite serious injuries means you're doing yourself more harm than good. If the paycheck ever gets replaced with duty or basic personal morals, then Barney is more than happy to wade through a hail of bullets to see his case through. Tickle that supposedly absent ethical bone of his, and you just might end up with a man-shaped fish's worth of private-eye moxie waiting to redecorate your face. If you're a good shot, this might be more of an opportunity than a threat.

Beyond the fact that sticking his controlled water sources under intense heat could get rather bad, Marsh's earned reputation is also something that needs to be considered. The more classically belligerent in Hope might hold their tongues and their trigger fingers for certain members of the force, but they won't if all you've got going for yourself is a laminate from your associated department. Barney's weird enough to give pause to the newbies around Sarvin, Weasel or Jimmy's gangs, of course, but the more wizened ones aren't likely to shy away from attempting to kick his ass out of whatever controlled public place he happened to stroll in. Marsh has more pull than your average cop in the seedier corners around town, but he also doesn't have the luxury of backup or legal recourse.

To be clear, Marsh isn't only a freak in the eyes of many, he's a freak and an asshole. Having a history of bringing his hard-nosed approach to spontaneous interrogations or casual info-fishing, he tends to rub the wrong people in town in all the wrong ways.

Sometimes, that's actually a plus. Being a little scrappy, he appreciates being forced to loosen a few tongues by showing that he isn't just an overgrown tuna with an attitude. Most of the time, however, he gets by thanks to his ability to keep on ticking after taking one heck of a licking. It goes without saying that he has virtually no pull in Hope's polite circles, and virtually gets along with absolutely nobody on the force.

His one virtue, in this regard, is that he gets along with some of the worst people in town – along with the helpful exception of Sophia. Some people compare him to someone who'd be stuck in Thomas Quint's shoes and who'd manage to actually be of some help while still being in a generally unenviable predicament.

Appearance: the Squids like to believe they have the monopoly on abject slavery in the twenty-first century, and any Amnesty International representative would be right to contest that fact by mentioning that slavery is still an ongoing problem in the Age of Information. The truth is that the Others aren't entirely forthcoming with their supposedly favored sons, and have also bestowed rare honors on the rare strain of particularly vile mermen and other sea-based Theriomorphs. That honor happens to be the undocumented species referred to as Servitors, in a few obscure texts related to some of Sarvin's ancestors.

To put it simply, a Servitor is a humanoid fish, a sentient beast of burden for the cold and dark parts of the ocean the Squids only travel into with armed retinues. Something like the Indian Untouchables in Finfolkaheem, they typically aren't abused, so much as they're simply taken for granted. Born out of the marked bloodlines of traitors to the cause or defectors, these fish-based humanoids have no common genetic root – and no common genetic factors or traits.

Barney's unlucky parents were a sea lion selkie and a merman who'd both taken to Providence, Rhode Island, in the centuries past, in the hopes of starting anew after a dissapointing turn in the last legs of Sarvin's active rule. Things didn't quite pan out for the Marshes, as later discovered and bastardized by a certain author...

Barney's face has a somewhat “anglerfish-alike” quality to it, with a large maw filled with hundreds of quill-like teeth and fairly distant yellow eyes that owe their lack of a fish-worthy stare to how luckily expressive the rest of his face happens to be. Still forward-facing, they tend to constantly look out to the world under a surly mein. That wide maw of his controls the rest of his emoting, with smiles looking perennially sarcastic – and even slightly worrying once the knuckle dusters come out. Pouts look especially mean on him, and even the most tranquil of resting expressions packs a kind of involuntary surliness. Half of it all is attributable to his career and life story, half of it comes from his genes.

Most of that seems like it's projected forwards a bit, and is delineated by equally wide lips, dark blue on his otherwise sea-green scales. They look as though he used to have quite the iridescent hide, but decades of land-lubbing office hours have robbed him of anything approaching a trout-like sheen, making his scales appear dull and lifeless. The effect is lessened once he gets wet, but only to a degree. Otherwise, something like an anglerfish's lure tends to dangle down in front of his face like a loose hair bang that'd somehow have gone radioactive, and usually packs a weak and fairly useless amount of bioluminescence you'd only notice in pitch-black environments.

Below the neck, a fairly round and compact build is visible. His proportions are standard in comparison to human expectations, but something about his hips and feet tends to indicate he's not built for anything we'd consider sleek and athletic. Tightly-packed flesh seems to be his standard, not so much in order to evoke obesity or lack of care as to suggest high levels of stamina. His species, on the whole, would usually appear in ways indicative of a propensity for physical work. Local commenters would say Barney is built for bar fights, back-alley brawls and other ridiculously unfair altercations. At five feet five for a fairly solid two hundred and thirty pounds, Barney does look like the tough cookie he needs to be. Idiots make the mistake of considering him fat, and typically find themselves on their ass a few moments later.

As thug-like as he might physically be, however, he does pack some detail work. Light green webbing extends between his fingers and toes, and he lacks traditional ears – instead relying on a pair of what resembles an axolotl's gills. Tiny bristles react to every change in surrounding air pressure – translating them all into audible sound.

His sartorial code goes with the territory, for the most part, with jacket-less suit ensembles looking like they haven't seen the laundromat in months, and his seemingly permanent raincoat nearly always slick with the water of some nearby puddle or leaky faucet. He quite visibly carries with him entire weeks' worth of denied fatigue, dark bags and droopy eyelids only accentuating the general sour dispositions he seems to radiate.

Outlined below, you'll see just how his appearance comes with some expectations regarding his behavior. His voice, chiefly, nearly always defeats the nightmarish expectations of some unfortunate thugs who haven't lived long enough to have heard of the one the Commission refers to as “the Fish”.

Far from gurgles or other watery pops and trills – unless when critically injured – he typically sounds like a somewhat younger Clint Eastwood, and packs the ordnance he'd need to make for a timely Dirty Harry impersonation.
Behavior: tourists tend to digest the oddities presented by Archie, Zebediah Buck or even Sophia fairly quickly, but few are those who expected to find something like Barney on a Sandhill corner. As far as the Accords, the modern era's understanding of magic and Darwinian evolution are all concerned, walking fish-men should most definitely not exist. The problem is, Barney certainly does exist; he just tends to fly under the radar on normal circumstances, which suits him just fine.

Basing themselves off The Creature of the Black Lagoon or other Z-Grade maritime horror stories, people tend to expect either a snarling creature covered in scales and loose kelp and algae, or an equally snarl-prone Deep One-alike walking straight out of Innsmouth, Massachusetts. What people get is someone who's seen so much of what makes this city such a terrible place to live in that they come across as extremely human and extremely capable; if extremely world-weary.

On the other hand, he also doesn't quite wax Romantic about the futility of fixing anyone's supernatural problems, and he doesn't quite sing his personal woes in any way that would make Zebediah Buck proud. He has ample reason to, but he seems to have taken to things in a way that opposes the local alcoholic lich's leitmotiv. Recognizing some serious fatherly stubbornness in himself, he'd much rather prove the Universe wrong about how worthless he would appear to be – preferrably by punching the next inhuman whatchamacallit in the nose.

The end result is a kind of “Bogartian” take on an immortal being's expected soliloquies. Being more than a little booze-prone like any decent hard-nosed private dick, even his deepest fit of drunken sorrow feels gritty and contained, more contemplative than self-destructive. Having enough professional integrity to stay sober while on the clock, Barney generally tends to come across as a guy who knows far more than his simple and usually profane lexicon lets on.

All the same, there's also long stretches where his brain isn't exactly given cause to be put to good use. Like any P.I., he subsists off a diet of lost items, unfaithful husbands and wives or ground-level B&E cases that are kept on the down-low because of some dangerous mob connection. When none of this comes a-calling, he's stuck filing for unemployment checks. His hours are long and fairly barbarous, he has to charge fairly severe rates in order to make ends meet – with the end result being someone who's forced to live off a diet of erratic sleep hours and far too many junk food stops. The end result is a kind of perpetual bedraggled surliness, his sometimes surprisingly bright little nugget of a brain fighting past exhaustion to hammer in the nail on the coffin of a case Kulich and Archie snubbed.

Being a bit on the crass side and being utterly unafraid to get in people's faces, Marsh has obviously understood that antagonism gets you somewhere in ways that are sometimes faster than a carefully cultivated friendship. In regards to Shield, however, his antagonism is less professional and more personal. Very much the self-made type, Archie's strict countenance rubs him the wrong way, along with the retinue's general confidence in their teamwork. Being more of a lone wolf, he keeps his eyes on several potentials in which all of Holden Hall's collective efforts could be rendered moot.

Professionally, he'd respect each and every member of the force – superhuman or otherwise. Personally? Well, there's nothing he quite likes as much as being on-site before the boys in blue, there to drop a used notepad in the hands of a bewildered detective with a fairly sharkish and satisfied smile. His own caseload sometimes putting him at odds with Shield's approaches or team-based workload-sharing, he sometimes has ample time to show up at the climax of an investigation, snarky grin firmly stapled in place and a non-verbal “Toldja so...” playing on his face.

As could be expected, he has some strong opinions on people, but knows to keep them to himself if these people are visibly trying to do good. He certainly knows what it feels like to have to work past and through a preordained destiny, and he knows how ungrateful that can be. It won't stop him from landing a few bar-side barbs at Drake or Jenkins, amongst others, but he shouldn't be expected to seriously impede their work.

The only case in which a reversal of the above occurs is when Sophia is concerned. Gruff respect is extended her way, largely thanks to the fact that she was one of the first few to stop him from slipping into cloying self-pity and to spur him into making something of himself.

Goals: to keep going, simply enough. Barney isn't like most immortals, in that he probably won't ever be in Wyvern's sights in regards to his financial compliance. He'd very much like to have a steady year, for once, instead of having to postpone his two rents every three to four months. Unless being pathetically broke becomes a criminal offense, he isn't likely to ever see the same administrative drudgeries as the local dragons or vampires.

If anything, he doesn't intend to lay down and die no matter how dire the situation might happen to be, and he expresses absolutely no curiosity in regards to his origins. His parents told him to leave the matter be, he suffered for long enough as a result of his childhood years and adolescence spent questing around for answers – and he now has been well and thoroughly dissuaded from poking in the matters of the Finfolk, purported dead gods from other realities, or other affiliated individuals.

History: amid the first few waves of Mertown's founders, you'd find Haytham Marsh and Anya Grimsdottir. One was an England-born Finman with ties to Sarvin's sunken kingdom, and she was part of a marauding band of Norse selkies with a decidedly more violent streak than your typical webbed human toting a Harbor seal's pelt. One was a Welsh pirate who'd seen the azure waters of the Caribbean a little closer than his other shipmates, the other was a Norse swashbuckler who came from a line who hadn't quite understood the need to abandon the Vikings' plundering ways after Moots became a thing of the past and aristocracy was implanted. Both used their alternate forms to great effect as marauders of the high seas or the craggy coasts of their homelands, and both weren't exactly what you'd consider model citizens. Fleeing deeper into Europe bought Anya a few centuries' worth of time to spend free from the eyes of Norwegian law enforcement, only to toss her into the old continent's waves of reprobates-turned-settlers. She and Haytham bonded quickly, thanks to Meer Island's relatively limited confines and employment opportunities, but she didn't learn of her soon-to-be-boyfriend's unfortunate past until it would be too late.

Originally, the Servitors were devised by the Others as a gift to the water-borne species of this world, in the hopes that offering them easily obtainable manual labor would shift them to Their cause. As wily and brazen as ever, Sarvin's ancestors kept the gift, just as they'd kept several lifetimes' worth of frightening magical acumen. Instead of using it as a mark of the Others' will, however, placing the Brand of the Servitors on certain disagreeable members of Finfolkaheem's populace served as a credible threat; a mark of shame forced upon criminals of the highest order – or deserters to the cause.

Haytham bore that particular mark, a seemingly random scar on the back of his right hand. He'd earned this for his refusal to remain in Sarvin's sovereign waters despite the lord's latest campaign being underway. He ran, choosing piracy in the surface world as a fall-back. Why choose to sail, asked Finmen of the seventeenth century, when you can swim? Finding freedom and power on the surface seemed alien to most of the mer-people, back then. Today, of course, Sarvin himself would sing an entirely different tune. Still, if Haytham had simply abandoned the waters, it would have been enough. More than anything, the decision to keep sailing over them while denying Finfolkaheem its maintaining patrol cycles and raids was the straw that broke the camel's back. Labeled a deserter, Marsh became the subject of an old ritual the king performed in his chambers, as he'd done for every other deserter of high political or tactical value.

Barney's future father spent an entire lifetime in the Keys and in Cuba's surrounding waters, first terrified of what the Mark meant for him, and later choosing to lay the matter aside. Nothing bad had happened, nevermind how many children's stories said the Mark was a terrible curse to bear. Legend had it that old Finmen curses of the same basic stripe had inspired the pirate custom of delibering the Black Spot to condemned former associates, but Marsh had seemingly survived much worse than a supernatural twist of fate...

Come the Letters of Pardon and the odd employment opportunity offered in the New World, Marsh honestly didn't have so much as a thought towards the Mark. He'd struck it rich in plunder and was glad to, it seemed, be given the chance to invest in his own parcel of land.

You can imagine his surprise and disappointment, then, when his new home turned out to be a small island just a stone's throw away from a thriving Rhode Island community of various mundane species. His plot of land turned out to be a small house just a short walk away from the piers, and his establishing trade would have to be that of a simple fisherman... He was, to put it mildly, quite frustrated.

Anya had similar goals for herself, and also found hers quashed by the dismal reality she faced. She threw herself into her work, her old bloodshed of centuries past turning into an industrious nature that compensated for Haytham's tendency to drink their earnings away. They both missed the sea and their freedom, and both knew entirely well that they'd killed any opportunity at claiming it for themselves. Besides, maybe they'd figure out a way to adjust, seeing as how other selkies seemed to manage exceptionally well – along with the then fairly mysterious members of the Scotland-based Mac Loch clan. Everyone on the island was a former ruffian of some persuasion or some uneducated lifelong fisherman who'd lived too long to pick up another trade. So, chewing on their resentment, they coped.

By 1823, things had noticeably improved. While Mertown was still under the effect of the Buck's curse, the cycle of high tides and still waters had become something the entire community coped with fairly well. Some people drowned, others lost everything, some tried for a shot at the canning factory's administration and tasted of entrepreneurial success, only to bite the bullet on their first independent business venture. Others, of course, seemed to exist in order to remind everyone of what success and good luck felt like. In April of that year, Anya's keen senses told her she was expecting, every cell in her body telling her the infant was healthy and strong. Local midwives only confirmed her species' natural instincts, the child looking to be a perfectly developed male selkie.

The waters froze, December came and her instincts concerning the baby seemed to grow ever more grim. At first, vague bouts of apprehension turned into fear for her baby's safety, then followed with waves of what she didn't immediately recognize as being disgust. Something was deeply wrong with her baby, or so the roanes' ancestral memory seemed to want to tell her. Still, placated by her shiftless if devoted husband, she carried Bartholomew Steede Marsh to term.

Suffice it to say, Christmas was a grim affair. Barney's first birthday presents were unsuccessful murder attempts by his mother and father, followed by a childhood and adolescence's worth of near-complete seclusion. For the longest time, Barney Marsh remained dead in the eyes of Mertown's locals. 1841 saw him graduate from his family's secret shame to the town's common project, the stubborn and supportive nature of the Mac Loch selkies and dragons driving them to shame his parents and plug the holes in the fish-shaped boy's education as only a tightly-knit community with a common secret could. What should have been the subject of horror or disgust became the sort of thing stone-faced mothers of five or six would stand up for, Barney soon coming to spend entire years away from his parents' residence while still living in Mertown. He'd shack with the O'Glennans one week and with the Learys the next, working odd jobs here and there by the favor of the authorities' ignorance of his existence. Even Angus Mac Loch, as much of a police captain and Deputy Chief as he'd become, lied to his consecutive peers about the local “fish boy” until the very day of the Vienna Accords' ratification.

The end result would be a young man who wouldn't know much of love if you smacked him in the face with it, but who understood the value of respect. It'd be some time before the head Water Dragon's influence would amount to honest pull in town, so most Mertown residents found assistance where they could and however they could – sometimes at the law's expense. Barney, notably, graduated from several years spent as a night-shift dock hand to the commercial freight yard's night watchman – a position that placed him in close proximity with the early contingents of the city's criminal elements. He'd spend several years facilitating the Bizzi patriarch's import operations, his seemingly ungrateful position giving him an insider's perspective on crime, the law, and how they happened to intertwine.

He'd have to wait until the Roaring Twenties to catch his break, while consistently sharpening his mind and deductive skills on seemingly random dockyard problems. Before long, the Biggs clan used their political pull to implant their then-period-appropriate “best man” in the precinct's index of consultants. He'd have to “fix” some cases in exchange for a substantial pay grade bump, while still being allowed to do what he did best. However, the only way someone like him could expect to receive any clients was if he was made to serve as the occult world's own private dick. Long before any sort of legislation would become available, there were a wealth of problems everyone from vampires to selkies and aliens, didn't trust the cops with. Someone outside the system was needed, someone who'd work under unenviable conditions in exchange for hard cash.

By 1935, Barney Marsh was a name the right people in Hope kept close. With him, vampires could come forth as themselves and Theriomorphs didn't need to beat around the bush or to try and find some sort of twisted way to get the mundanes to investigate a stolen pelt without raising eyebrows. He was one of the very few paralegal outlets anyone in town had; and he kept abreast of his initial criminal connections. “The Fish” needed to keep a foot in the murky waters of organized crime, as the future elements of the Commission all had resources someone like him could use, in the absence of any potential legal recourse. The price for that limited notoriety and connectivity was mistrust. As he worked the angles he needed to work for the clients he needed to service, he kept several other allies in the dark more often than not, forging friendships and damaging them much faster than your average careless and antisocial mundane. He was known, but he was no longer trusted. He'd needed to turn his back on some of Mertown's oldest and most faithful inhabitants on occasion, all because of a crime that had been retraced back to them, centuries after the fact.

One of the few supernaturals in town he hadn't needed to harm, use, exploit or otherwise abuse for the benefit of his work happened to be Sophia. She'd simply never come under investigation for one of his cases, most culprits knowing to keep Centennial Park's dryad out of their shady deals. By the turn of the Second World War, Marsh hit his only significant depressive stride to date, something to be expected after several lifetimes' worth of forced isolation and professional detachment.

Considering, May 1945 is a period that's firmly etched in his brain. What started as an offhand comment after startling the dryad on a night-time stroll became a series of almost clockwork-like meetings, Barney feeling that Sophia was someone he could connect with, someone he didn't need to guard himself from. Only once did he push an evening's worth of drunken caterwauling on her, Sophia making him realize his job, however grim, was essential. She didn't like his working with Jimmy Winters and his boys, but nobody had stepped up to give supernaturals a voice. Dryads like her got a pass thanks to the vital nature of their protected trees, but so many people had to hide away from the wider world! Until someone gave supernaturals a common front, they'd all be stuck skulking in Humanity's shadows. The best thing to do was to live with it, and to find all those little shards of honesty and openness that could be found. Barney not being too unreasonable or insufferable a hard-boiled louse, the dryad agreed that they could keep chatting every now and then.

For thirty more years, Marsh's life would read like a grittier and less encouraging take on The Dresden Files, the Fish finding reason enough to keep going in after-hours meals shared with Jimmy or Sophia, or in these rare and appreciated cases of a mundane showing clear signs of open-mindedness. Come the sixties, perhaps out of the rising via levels that preceded the Battle of Hope, Marsh noticed a gradual lessening of the wall between his activities and those of the cops. The mundanes were learning, coming to tool themselves up more efficiently, and their eyes were being opened to things they'd once held as self-evident. The Battle obviously put a nail in his initial business, as there wasn't much sleuthing to do so much as quite a bit of gunplay and several frantic attempts to melt bystanders and other innocents into puddles. He'd emerge across town, where the mortar drops sounded distant, and leave dazed and disoriented mundanes behind. They were alive, however, and that was the most he could conceivably offer them.

He took his fair share of bullets, downed his fair share of Chimeras, and obtained a few useful bits of intel for another group that would come to accept him – Holden Hall's original occupants as well as City Hall's constituents. He didn't have the clout needed to work in tandem with the Golden Age heroes, but he did have the moxie required to interrogate enemy prisoners. Decades spent disciplining overeager thugs had taught him the worth of a good right cross as much as the importance of keeping a sharp mind and choosing the right words...

As the dust settled and the Vienna Accords were ratified, everything changed for him. The little things came first, like his first chequing account ever and the end of his exclusive reliance on cash. The law suddenly mattered to him, so he couldn't just expect word-of-mouth to get him cases. It took him a few years to get his name in with a few department Rolodexes, and from there to get used to the intricacies and sometimes fairly petty grievances of the mundanes, as opposed to mages who'd lost a prized arcane focus or vampires who'd had their fangs stolen and who needed to reclaim them before going feral. It all broadened his professional horizon, of course, but didn't quite push him to think highly of the mundanes or superheroes. Superhuman or just plain human misery is still what puts food on his plate, and the requirements of his profession are fairly barbarous, compared to the cushy confines of a nine-to-five job.

Today, Barney Marsh stands as the local resource for penniless residents in need of swift justice, or of illegals in need of some legal support. He doesn't openly talk about his clients, and yet scoffs quietly at the sight of the HCPD's offered statistics concerning solved cases. His non-disclosure agreement is as binding and serious as any Fae Oath, and even Inspector Kulich knows the local Eldritch flatfoot can't confirm or deny his involvement in a lot of cases his own men just can't put their finger on. Considering his angle of approach, Marsh is more or less antithetical to Shield on a professional level, even if he doesn't oppose them personally. That doesn't especially help his popularity with the more law-abiding sorts in town, but there are still plenty of people in town who feel there isn't much of anybody they can trust with particular issues.

Today, however, Marsh is in the phone book and in online directories. No longer Hope's best-kept secret, he's the kind of guy some people are still more comfortable with, concerning their best-kept secrets...
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