John Smith

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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John Smith

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Name: John Smith
Age: 88 years old
Gender: male
Species: anthro woolly mammoth

Strengths: standing at the head of Goliath Corporation, Henry Smith's son displays the shrewd business sense, propensity towards ruthlessness and the calculative, deceptive instincts you'd expect someone to need in order to survive in the cutthroat world of high-stakes businesses skirting the boundaries of your average monopoly. A master poker face, few of his associates and members of his Board of Directors ever truly get to grasp the extent of his own plans for the city, country and indeed, most of the world. All that really filters out is his willingness to submit to both personal and public sacrifices in order to obtain what it is he desires. His main weapon is the corporate system in and of itself. Whoever gets in his way, he purchases – or purchases and then dissolves. Out of all this, he remains in the good graces of the government largely because of his willingness to very consciously let a few competitors roam free.

As you can expect, he has a small army of lawyers behind which to retreat, decades of accumulated goodwill as the CEO of a trusted American service provider, and publicly displays enough moral integrity to stand against competitors who would submit to the more scabrous varieties of attempts to bring him down.

This backs a very lucid and organized mind, which tends to be focused on far-reaching goals. Like other corpocratic figures, Smith is willing and able to suffer any and all required costs – including laying off talented collaborators with seemingly no rhyme or reason or backing up contentious projects on the surface level – so that he can later bend the output to suit his needs, desires and ideals.

While his goals are unreservedly noble, spending some time with him gives you the impression that once he gets an idea in his head he believes is worth pursuing, he will do anything he possibly can to see it through. Including destroying careers, lives and research fields, or forcing another company or otherwise innocent individuals to shoulder the blame. This gives him a far greater level of flexibility than more traditionally chivalrous models, like Percival.

The same applies to his physical capabilities. Being humanoid, he has access to the same reflex and agility potential as the rest of us. Generally, he tends to enter unavoidable physical confrontations with a very ponderous and suitably heavy and solid approach to combat. If need be, however, he can leave his hard and slow grappling motions behind for sudden kicks and punches that come with the full brunt of his strength – and a fairly terrifying amount of speed. His normally gentle and precise proboscis can also be used to strangle opponents.

In any case, he certainly can pocket the schemer and brawler tendencies he has, and instead offer a congenial, gentle and seemingly honest presentation that puts him forward as a fairly friendly sort. The truth of it he's been forced to adapt to a great many different moods and approaches. Something calls for his being a big overgrown teddy bear? He'll be as cuddly as he needs to be. A press conference calls for him to be flatly professional? That's what he'll be. An interview demands a colder and more incisive delivery? No problem.

Where his brother Caliban is unreservedly honest, nobody really knows where the mammoth sits, or what he truly wants for Hope. The only thing most people know is that right here and right now, the end results of his efforts are proving to be beneficial.

Finally, being of mammoth blood, his family is rooted in at least one of the via-drenched clans that roamed the icy plains of the last Ice Age. The end result is that he, like most other anthro mammoths, displays a slowed amount of genetic senescence. At 88 years of age, you'd chalk him up as being around his early 50's.
Weaknesses:the pachyderm's gambits can run fast, loose, precise and deep; but it doesn't change the fact that Big Business fosters slightly sociopathic tendencies. People are less people to the mammoth, are are more akin to tools to put to good use. Profits, control and maintained dominance are driving most of what he does, which means he isn't above collecting a fairly worrying collection of sworn enemies. Death threats, assassination attempts and pies thrown at him by college-level proponents of a new economy during protests are all things he's had to dodge. To some people, John Smith is a visionary and a genius; an inventor and literal life-saver. To many more, he's Big Business in its most overt form, with his eyes supposedly set on the biggest, largest and most obvious of all targets: profit. More and more profit.

He's been attacked on-stage, in radio interviews – and in the flesh. What he does tends to offer a veritable cornucopia of valid to semi-valid reasons to loathe him enough to try and see him killed. He's either a heartless Capitalist, an alien sympathizer, an atheist asshole or the veritable incarnation of everything that's wrong with America, if you go by the perceptions of certain terrorist cells. Of course, he's sometimes killed right back, or ordered someone else to do the deed for him. This adds accusations of moral shiftiness to the mix. As some people are fond of saying, he's one of the few Terrans who'd fit right in, in Paradise.

One of the problems this fosters is that even those closest to him don't really get to know him. Everything feels calculated, premeditated. This not only explains how he's still single after all this time, but how it is that his circle of friends seems to be nonexistent. He certainly can let loose for a few hours and swap stories and wine bottles around; but unlike Aldergard, there isn't a whole lot of earnestness to it all. Even at his most relaxed and casual, he can remain tight-lipped about a lot of things.

It also suggests that he'd do fairly poorly in entirely unplanned circumstances. Most people can put up with a smidgen of chaos in their lives, but you sometimes get the impression that one curveball too many would be just what he'd need to burst into white-hot rage. Some people have seen a strange congruence between Smith's and Rendell's temperaments, suggesting a kind of similar intellectual upbringing. Not that anyone would be surprised, considering how the Chimeras came into being and how the Smiths have traversed History as a dynasty of schemers and plotters, one and all.

Considering, he's not very good at adapting on the fly. His combat techniques tend to involve weathering blows and attempting to direct fights towards the most desirable outcome. This gives most assaillants all the needed time to pepper him with blows or bullets, while he's trying to make it so he only has to lash out once. As thick as his hide is, enough bullets or bullets of a sufficient calibre will eventually kill him; while blades are, well, blades. They do what blades tend to do, which is slash at people. Enough blows and you're bound to lose a lot of blood, or limbs.

Appearance: at six feet eight and four hundred and thirty pounds, his build might appear to suggest obesity to certain people; but his square shoulders aren't the result of straight-angled shoulder pads. Far from being fat, a mere handshake is enough for others to understand that he's more of a sequoia tree stump on legs than a stereotypical fatso. There's an undeniable sense of solidity to his person, both physically and intellectually. He very clearly is a man who moves and thinks only the way he intends to move and think, and who doesn't so much dodge and weave his way through a crowd as simply step through it. His sense of presence and presentation magnify this impression, considerably widening his personal space. With short, solid legs and arms that would make life-long strongmen drool with envy, he very clearly looks like someone you do not want to mess with – either in a courtroom, conference hall, or out in the street. He's been shot and stabbed before, with the kind of knife thrusts that would send your average human to the hospital only ending up with a few stitches and minor blood loss. His slabs of developed muscle structure are large and powerful, enabling him to up-turn small cars and conceivably break mere humans and weaker anthros' backs on the flat of his knee.

To PR nerds and journalists, he moves and acts like a long-time CEO and politico, with a kind of casual authority that's backed up by the right smiles and the right friendly wrinkles around his largely invisible mouth. His control over himself is undeniable, with his big mitts handling human-sized keyboards and fountain pens with complete ease. At the same time, life-long fighters and killers have recognized him as one of their own just by his televised appearances. The same ease that seems merely casual to most of us speaks of a man who hasn't had to fear for himself in a long, long time if you go by some estimates. Some Drifter collaborators have confessed that he's sometimes been forced into seedier locales before, and managed to convince fairly burly fellows to leave him alone with nary a glance.

If anything, it gives weight to the fact that the Smith family's apparent tradition of absolutism includes fairly unique rites of passage. Rich daddy's-boys typically get sent off to boarding schools in Switzerland, while John was instead sent off to Vietnam. The official family spiel involves wanting to study French in one of the Colonial schools, but private eyes have come perilously close to unearthing the fact that Henry Smith's idea of forging a young man's character involved kicking him out of house and home with the objective of trying his luck in one of the most hostile places on Earth, circa the late sixties...

According to some, the young man who left Hope at the tail end of the Golden Age was a big, furry wad of cookie dough. The man who returned would avenge his father's later death in the Battle of Hope by single-handedly slaughtering small groups of Chimeras – in what he claimed to be self-defense. The Smith idea of the Man is obviously a toughened survivor, both in the boardroom and off in the field.

The only way to soften that impression in order to avoid scaring off reporters is to pick the right clothes and give off the right smells. It's fairly obvious to all that John's training regimen is not only unusually intensive, but requires two or three grown men to add their own weight and bulk to his spars and weightlifting sessions. To counter that, his double-breasted suits and impecably chosen ties, cufflinks and bifocals all contribute to the task of smoothing his frame into that false impression of obesity. Round and powerful abdominal muscles become a sympathetically large gut, huge hands give out equally huge, if very soft hugs in children's hospitals; imposing physiques are softened by careful and sometimes even worried gestures around standard-size homes and apartments, as if he were the proverbial elephant in a china shop and had enough sense to try to not break things. His soft robin's-egg eyes and low, slightly rumbling voice are all usually catered to evoke nothing if the utmost care and respect. It goes right down to him washing his weekly shorn fur with the right scented shampoos so that the rare and eventual female conquest feels okay with burying her face in the crook of his neck, right in front of one of his large ears.

In essence, the big teddy bear of old isn't so much gone as it's become another tool for him to use. He'll be as fuzzy and congenial as can be, but it doesn't take much for his voice to harden, his eyes to turn like blue flints and for his inherently calculative and self-centered leanings to return to the forefront.
Behaviour: as said above, most of the general public knows him as a massive, if approachable fellow. When speaking for his gaming and entertainment subsidiary and asked to play the guinea pig for this or that new video game console, he'll be as willing to goof off in front of a rapt audience as Nintendo of America's CEO was, during the Wii Fit's unveiling. If speaking for a medical subsidiary, he'll convey the kind of hope for the future anyone who puts their faith into medical technologies would want and need to hear. If speaking for his Applied Sciences division during a CES keynote or a TED conference, he'll be every inch of the the reverent and awed super-nerd he needs to be to pitch his product to an already conquered audience. In talk shows, he never fails to appear to be someone who can take a berjillion fat jokes with a good-natured smile and a few laughs. In public, he manages to appear imposing, yet humble. On the screen or on paper, he shows up as the rational and pragmatic leader the corporation calls for.

The truth of the matter is he doesn't really know where he exactly fits, in all of this. He knows what people expect of him at seemingly any given moment and does his best to deliver it, but he has a hard time seeing people for what they are, as a result. As beneficial as Goliath's research tends to be, his apparent idealism isn't so much something he personally carries as it's another suit he puts on, when and where it's needed. This is largely to blame on his large intellect.

High-IQ individuals are sometimes said to be easily bored. John fits the bill in both categories, with everyday occurrences being achingly mind-numbing for him, and flat-out honesty lacking depth and challenge. He plans and controls everything not because of his neat-freak tendencies or because of his need to mastermind whatever it is he's involved in, but because letting things take their natural course is probably the most soporific approach to problem-solving he knows of. Some of his detractors wrongfully assume he has a bloated ego and constantly needs to have it be flattered, but his self-image would be revealed to be bluntly clinical and lucid. He doesn't think much of himself – he simply deeply and seriously needs to take charge, and to feel the threads of an unfolding situation resting in his fingers. He only ever feels alive when he's weaving agendas, lies and stratagems together, and when everything he does is tied to an over-arching goal. As such, inherently passive activities bore him immensely. He doesn't read much more than newspapers, can't really stand to listen to music he isn't putting together directly, and movies and television are both things he tends to consider as sleeping aids.

When he can invest himself, however, he does so fully and without the least bit of restraint. His fundamentally cold nature pierces the surface when his attention is needed for one of Goliath's divisions and its projects. The congenial type then goes out the window, with something akin to the glacial cousin of Aldergard's passion becoming perceptible. Things either develop his way whilst on the company campus, or it's the highway for whomsoever is involved in the dissent. Seemingly merely strict in front of outside observers, privileged members of the company's structure could tell of his frankly obsessive focus on control. He's fired entire janitorial staffs for finding shards of toilet paper on the floor in the bathroom standing closest to his boardroom. He's dismantled entire projects that were progressing as intended only because one of the project leads dared to put a more personal spin on his directives. While this makes him practically immune to corporate coups and mutinies, it fundamentally exposes the fact that most of the company's innovative force comes directly from him, and not quite as much from the scientists and researchers he finances.

On occasion, he finds himself pushing for the aggressive buyout of a rival. If he's pushed back, you can expect the responsible parties to go up in flames, figuratively speaking. Whomsoever he doesn't consume, he destroys outright. There is precisely one outstanding judgment against him, involving the apparent long and torturous agony of Northeastern Microsystems' Chief Financial Executive, throughout a decade's worth of terminal cancer. Conspiracies suggest that NM resisted a buyout, John increased his offer unsuccessfully, and would have found and used the means to have the responsible CFO replaced. There's also tales of mob hits being called on him, only for the hitmen to be not seen or heard from again after slipping in the mammoth's residence. Old flames and ex-girlfriends could speak of his being a perfect gentleman, up until the point where his desires are ignored. Resist him, according to them, and he doesn't so much turn violent as cold. Distant and emotionally lifeless. Please him, however, and he'll love you back with a gentle, if almost frightening level of earnestness.

When he does manage to nurture something resembling a friendship, he tends to reveal that he lacks practice at being honest. Baring himself to the outside world on an emotional or psychic level is something he has little practice with. Katherine could genuinely get him hammered in preparation to a bit of forced emotional sleuthing or even knock him out cold, that even his hazy, unconscious mind would feel like a literal fortress. Not just to others, but to himself, as well. The family's demands have been so hard on this otherwise brilliant mind that for all that the pachyderm does know, he has no true understanding of who he really is or where he stands.

This is largely what allows him to sling-shot himself almost endlessly between Grade-A Villain status and the classic position of the trusted ally for the hero of whatever tale he finds himself in. If his goals require of him that he play the part of a billionnaire philanthropist backing a small group of vigilantes with conviction and technical support, he'll do it. If those same goals end up needing of him that he coldly betray those same people, he'll also do it without a second's thought.

If one thing's certain, it's that nobody would want or should want to face against him in single combat. Only supernaturals, exosuit wearers or certain Wyldfae could conceivably stand a chance against him.

All the same, there's obvious good in those projects he puts forward. New armatures and augmentations, better building materials, more effective medicinal proteins and enzymes – and he's deliberately allowed several rivals to keep plying their craft... How much of what he does can be attributed to interested hypocrisy, and how much can be understood to be honest goodwill; nobody knows.

Goals: control. Optimization. The betterment of Humanity at all costs and against all odds. He fundamentally disagrees with Gregory Rendell in the shape and tone of his envisioned perfection, in that he doesn't put other species aside or dismiss them as being inferior. Society as a whole is made up of the total sum of the individuals comprising the modern world's population; from mortals to Sidhe, Karthians and Drifters alike. To ostracize any group would be detrimental to the whole. Each and every one of us deserves to live painlessly, efficiently – and as seen and envisioned by Goliath's obviously enlightened perspective.

To that end, sacrifices must be made and will be made. People will suffer, others will die. Some will have deserved it, others won't. Friends will be made and enemies encountered. Amidst it all, there is no clear-cut Good or Evil. There's only those who stand by Goliath's side as creditors, clients or collaborators, and everyone else.

If he suffers from it, if someone manages to wrest tears from him, then so be it. John is a Smith. Smiths do not complain. Smiths endure. He's more than willing to die if his agenda ever happens to intersect with the Sidhe or Shield's, if protecting Hope from the Others becomes congruent with his own interests. If, on the other hand, he glimpses Perfection past the Far Reaches and if Amaxi and Her Brothers were to make it clear to him that their engineered chaos is the Perfection he seeks, then he'll do everything in his power to grasp it.

As far as he knows, however, and as far as anyone knows, the Others are still a fundamentally noxious presence. To start out, backing Shield financially and technically seems to be the most profitable venture on a long-term basis. It isn't a personal endorsement, however – at least not initially. Final goals are always to be considered. He knows the key to it all is via and what it leads to, but Rendell's calamitous brush with the Centennial Tree is discouraging him from considering a direct attempt at acquiring the dryad's guarded power.

As of now, it seems that more research is required. More observation, more protective and defensive measures. More time. As far as he knows, playing for time involves playing both with and for the Shield Act's results...

History: the Smith family has a long and storied, if covert history. During the last Ice Age, John's distant ancestors were chieftains and advisors alike. Antiquity saw them splinter between barbarian warlords and patricians and speakers in the cities of Rome and Greece. The Middle Ages had their intellectual lords-of-the-manor shaping the Crusades for their own ends, while the Renaissance has the Ferraro family and its strong influence on the Medici. The Smythes would prove influential in the War of the Roses, while the German Karl Schmidt and Henry Smith – John's father – would each pay a part in the later years of the Second World War. Their main weapon has always been politics, intrigue has always been in their veins. They've left relatively few traces in History and this is, paradoxically, precisely how they all tend to like it.

Publicly, Goliath's motto is “Building a Better World Together”. The family, on the other hand, tends to tack the Smith motto to the corporate entity, something which has survived from Ancient Rome : Tolerantiam generat patientia. Patientia generat viribus. Fortitudo generat estimatio. In English, this stands for “Endurance begets patience. Patience begets strength. Strength begets conviction.”

Absolutism is an integral part of the Smith creed, something which seems to be as deeply rooted as the shamanistic leanings of the old Ice Age clan leaders. Some would call it stubbornness, but surety of purpose would be a more accurate description. The boys have always been brought up to be full-spectrum warriors – both verbally and physically. The women of the family are chosen for their ambition and willingness to tolerate misfortune for the greater good. Love is a hard-earned thing in this dynasty, with parental protection only going so far in its ability to shape the boy or daughter into a man or woman. Hardship is deemed as being essential to the formation of a solid character, and pain is said to have an intrinsic value. Nothing comes cheaply to these furred pachyderms who make up almost 75% of the world's total population of a few hundred thousand mammoth anthros, and all are driven and encouraged to dream big, want big, and think big. Idealism and ruthlessness are encouraged, as this fits in rather nicely in the continuity of hard-bitten foragers who started out roaming the Arctic plains looking for scraps of lichen and the occasional smilodons to bring down with their spears.

Of them all, few are chosen. Some slip through the cracks, even. You'll find the occasional distant relative of John's who doesn't have much more than a B.A. and a cushy little job. As basely successful as they might be, the wider clan considers them as failures. If anything, Henry and John Smith both seem to be the wider family's most glaring success stories in a few centuries.

Owing to his family's general lifespan, Henry Smith's roots were in England, during the Enlightenment. He grew up just as the British Colonies were beginning to stir to a more independent form of life, and would be urged to seize the new and fresh market masonry offered for the developing American shores, in the late 1790s and early 1800s. Henry reached Hope's shores in 1821 and immediately established Mammoth Offices, Green Island's premier drafting and contract-working entity. John's father, while not as influential as the Bucks or Greenes, would still come to greatly influence the look and feel of the city's buildings and streets up until the beginning of the Industrial Era. John can be rather proud, in fact, in knowing that most of what makes up Old Hope has been drafted and sometimes even directly constructed by his father. With the focus shifting as Industry and Progress take their place, Mammoth Offices would be swiftly reorganized and rechristened as Mammoth Engineering Solutions, in 1876.

The years passed and Henry grew older, even as he continued to largely shape the city. He had an unsuspected amount of pull in the local administration and had his trunk digging fairly deep in the then-covert means and requirements of the local Freaks, conveniently “forgetting” worker passageways in the first few subway tunnels to be laid down, and condemning catwalks in such a way as to make life easier for Arthur Holden and his cohorts. If he needed something, all that was required was a deft metaphorical twist or two, and the city's vampires saw to his needs.

MES expanded outside of Hope, rapidly taking and delivering on high-rise contracts across America and contributing in the rapid expansion of formerly sleepy towns into the influential business hubs of tomorrow. Collecting debt from a large number of mayoral and governmental instances around the country, he racked in enough money to push his workers out towards Europe and Asia. Before long, some people were complaining that Mammoth had grown to be as large as the Pinkertons of yesteryear – and Henry swiftly downsized the company. As he'd expected, the policies of Roosevelt and Taft would be a literal nightmare for the Rockefellers and United Oils of the country, Smith's entreprise missing the proverbial hammer by only a few short years.

In 1937, Henry had a son, John, from his marriage with Jacqueline Wallis; an acquaintance of the Bucks. Wallis had grown to be a friend of Eliphas Buck thanks to her strong temperament, and her being able to watch the cursed family's regular cycles of calamity with a cool outlook had obviously impressed the mammoth. She, also, tended to respond favorably to Henry's blunt personality, being every bit as incisive as he was.

If they were loving parents, it decidedly was in a very tough fashion. Baby mammoth anthros tend to be fairly clumsy and defenseless, but Jackie rapidly took to the stories of Henry's own upbringing and largely ignored her own son. Much like a wild elephant mother, she'd step in if her son clearly had no chance of being able to solve this or that problem on his own; but otherwise didn't dole out much more than offhand praise and faint congratulations. As a result, John's idea of love would prove to be fairly cold, in comparison to what most of everyone else expects. Even today, he seems to regard parenting as an annoyance – a logistical necessity that all couples would be better off without.

In 1953, the future heir to the entreprise was sixteen. Physically mature and much more intellectually prepared than most kids his age thanks to his fairly passionless upbringing, his true training began on his birthday, the doughy exterior of his childhood years being ruthlessly peeled off of his developing muscles. Merciless training regimens were forced onto him as a rather lopsided “present”, as were the bare-bones basics of corporate management. Before he'd be able to claim his true prise, however, Henry stated his son had to know pain. John had been bullied before, but he'd been like most of the gentler kids in that he'd cried and refused to strike back.

The next year, his birthday present was a packed suitcase and the door. Henry didn't say why or when his son was expected to return, instead deceiving him into thinking that he'd failed in his lessons and training. A few weeks were spent wandering the city, Henry having gone so far as to overtly threaten the police force with legal action if anyone so much thought to pick up the initially frightened, saddened, angry and confused teen anthro.

Honestly, Henry was expecting to see his son claw his way through to the city's scummy underbelly and then back up, but he hadn't expected to see John understand that this was all part of an elaborate test. In 1955, just as the hostilities in Vietnam began to attract the attention of American politicians, the young pachyderm packed his bags and took off to Saigon.

To his surprise, his father provided him with a credible alibi. A scholarship in one of the local French universities awaited him, complete with a professed desire to learn Molière's tongue in a means that would feel a little more exotic and unpredictable than flat-out heading to Paris or Montreal.

The truth of the matter is that he'd spend years, up until 1972, buried to his neck in Vietcong atrocities. As to why, he didn't really need a reason for it. All he'd wanted was to find the most vicious, inhospitable place where there were things enough that would try to kill him, and punch and gore his way through it. His father wanted him to grow acquainted with pain and sacrifice? Then he'd become the supposedly insane civilian American Marines would tell of, who'd entered the jungles of the Mekong of his own free will, with no other intention than to survive.

Against all odds, it worked. To others would go the dubious honour of finding distant traces of Void Weaver cults or of predictably losing their mind. He didn't, even if his heart and body were considerably hardened by the experience. The confused and angry teen he'd once been was now 35 years old, and carried scars and pain enough to be welcomed back into the fold. He'd murdered and eaten things he'd never believed he'd be forced to murder or eat. If there were any traces left of the vulnerable child seeking guidance and honest love inside him, they'd been obliterated.

He returned to Hope just in time to participate in the preliminary events that would culminate in the Battle of Hope, with his finding Caliban as an adoptive brother along with his father, a now aging man who was more than ready to face death.

1975 saw the expected events occur, with Henry Smith managing to take a few Chimeras with him into death. The younger mammoth liberally avenged his and his mother's death by letting himself loose against the Chimera contingents, but returned to the process of steering Mammoth Engineering along fairly quickly.

With the city destroyed, millions had been rendered homeless. The need for new residences obtained or built on the cheap was understandably immense, which would trigger the company's first few contracts with Drifter foremen and engineers, along with Karthian advisors.

By the eighties, it became clear to John that the construction market had been tapped out. This wasn't something he was interested in if it meant redoing what they'd done for Hope. New challenges were required, new directives were demanded. Thankfully, his inheritance and the money the company had made were more than enough to finance a few acquisitions...

Goliath Corporation has been steadily expanding outward ever since, teasing and testing other sensitive monopolies and swallowing whatever it is the government fails to notice or care for. Everything that comes to bear the stylized cudgel's design now seems geared towards some over-arching purpose, something that Henry Smith wouldn't have considered not out of disapproval, but out of a lack of vision. There's something John has grasped that no other Smith, Schmidt, Schmeider, Ferré or Lefevre seems to have stumbled upon – and he's shooting straight for it; his distant cousins growing ever paler in comparison, in an extended family that seems to be chock-full of other CEOs with just as much promise.

Curiously, the only Smith who seems somewhat concerned by John's meteoric development in the aftermath of the Battle of Hope is the one and only Smith who isn't related to them by blood, however distantly.

Caliban recognizes some elements of his nefarious precursor in John, and is lucid enough to admit that he does take to the family's ambitions naturally, himself. Sadly, however, it feels as though he's the only one who would rather submit technology to noble ideals, instead of the other way around...
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