Dexter Grif
From Brokedownway
| Grif | ||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
| ||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||
Dexter Grif is a man in constant redefinition, whether he realizes it or not. He's also got a rather... extensive history, for which his mun apologizes.
Contents |
[edit] it's just one of those days
[edit] feelin' like a freight train
The 26th century was a rough time for humanity. The alien Covenant had declared war and were destroying colony world wherever they found them, and it was only a matter of time before they found Earth and finished the job. Nevertheless, the people of tourism-oriented Hawaii were determined to make their city a place where people could get away from that subliminal terror that tinged the everyday life.
His parents' influence more notable in the absence than the observance, Dexter grew up on Honolulu's streets as much as his own home, learning many of life's tougher lessons at a fairly young age. Moving from one group of hooligans to another, he amassed a hodge-podge of con artistry and thievery skills. Had he been trained by a single, sufficiently knnowledgeable mentor, it's possible that he could've been one of the greats. Instead, he was merely good enough to get by without getting caught, and without descending into violence, which was a better than a lot of his fellow crooks.
When Dexter was ten, his sister Kaikaina was born. It's the only impact that he can still remember his father having in his life, and Kaikaina was the first member of his family that he felt any caring for, beyond providing him a place to live. Years later, not long after Dexter reached adulthood, their mother abandoned them, running off to join the circus (as both the Beared Lady and the Fat Lady). Their father already long gone, this left Dexter to raise and provide for Kaikaina. The need to avoid jail keener than ever, he increasingly shifted towards legitimate jobs, expanding his skillset while keeing them solvent.
(Dexter would like to think he did his best to raise Kaikaina right, but good big brothers don't try to teach their little sisters how to commit grand theft auto.)
The Covenant were defeated only by the narrowest of margins and with a great deal of sacrifice. Still, the people rejoiced, many of them experiencing for the first time a world without a war. Of course, it couldn't last, and what happened next depends on who you ask. The official story, according to the history books, was that a schism developed in the upper echelons of United Nations Space Command for reasons that could only be guessed at. However it happened, Command declared war on itself, only averting total chaos in their apparent insanity by agreeing on specific rules of engagement, including an even split in the distribution of forces between the two sides.
Unfortunately, due to an unexpected Conscientious Objector filing, Red Army was one man short. Crazy as they were, Command instituted the first draft in the UNSC's 400-year history to find one person to fill the ranks. The unlucky winner: Dexter Grif, hauled from his home one night without even getting to say goodbye to his sister and thrust unceremoniously into the SPARTAN-II program. The modifications had been improved over the years, made more widely applicable, but there were still potential complications.
[edit] first one to complain
Forcibly put into the program, Dexter received none of the usual testing that volunteers were given to ensure that they'd be compatible with the process. Unsurprisingly, there were complications: The worst by far was the scattered yet pervasive damage done to his existing memories as a result of the superconductor nerve replacement procedure. Grif had to relearn the use of language, and names, faces, and events remain blank to him all over the course of his past history. As he put his mind back together, all of these indignities formed the nucleus of what he would later call his "Draftee Rage," which, if he simply let himself act on it, would almost surely get him killed. He wanted, needed, to get out, but death was not the escape he sought. Prison wouldn't be much better, but it would suffice if freedom couldn't be achieved.
To keep his anger in check, Grif worked at keeping himself busy while keeping everyone else in the dark about it. He quietly abused a UNSC education initiative for the cash to take distance-learning business classes at Harvard (yes, that Harvard), and used what he learned to start up DG Enterprises, a company that he could run from remote, both for some sense of autonomy and to continue to provide for Kaikaina. At the same time, he used the acting portion of his con artistry skills to present a whole new façade to his personality. He exaggerated all of his most slothful, cowardly, and apathetic capacities into the very picture of uselessness, capped off with biting sarcasm, obfuscating stupidity, and an open desire to be anywhere else. Hopefully, the Army would get sick of him, court martial him, and ship him home.
(He thought he was doing this to keep from going insane. He's since realized that he made his act so good that he started to believe it himself. This was either not as clever as he'd initially thought, or more clever than was good for him.)
There were, of course, some snags. For one thing, he was being pushed to complete the training -- aided by the standard regimen of chemically-coded muscle-memory injections -- and he just couldn't disguise the skills his legally dubious vehiclar history gave him behind a wheel, or his natural talent for marksmanship with the sniper rifle. (That last one surprised everybody.) For another, despite those unexpected proficiencies, the members of the fake Command overseeing the Red Army felt that the draft had given them a raw deal... but also thought that the man they got would have to quit in order for them to try again.
[edit] leaves with a blood stain
After training, Grif was sent to Blood Gulch, where he joined a Sergeant who believed in the war, hated Grif for not caring, and dabbled in mad science; an ass-kissing second in command who alternated between joking with Grif and trying to kill him for Sarge; and a robot mechanic who Sarge specifically programmed to hate Grif. After a few miserable years of tedium and avoiding death, both squads each got a rookie, and that's when the trouble started.
The next few years were pretty crazy. One year after the rookies arrived, Grif got run over by the Blues' tank, and would've died, except that Sarge was already on a mad science kick. Despite lack of medical training and having only a cow meat-cuts diagram for reference, Sarge transplanted organs left over from simultaneously turning his second in command into a cyborg. It worked -- barely -- but only because Grif's armor's life-support systems filled in the gaps. This did not, of course, deter Grif from abusing his new organs just as badly as the originals, even going so far as to devise means by which he could at least drink and smoke without removing his helmet.
The year after that, during an unexpected team-up between the two squads, a combination of a massive bomb and a weather control system (both built by Sarge) caused a space/time rift that threw them into The Future (later determined to be approximately 800 years, or the 34th century), mysteriously upgrading their armor (everything is very shiny in The Future) and depositing them on what seemed like an unknown other world. They explored it for a while, and seemingly settled matters with the enemy who'd caused the team-up. Following a distress signal, the Reds eventually discovered... that they had arrived back at Blood Gulch. Grif's cries of despair went on for quite some time.
[edit] damn right, I'm a maniac
[edit] you better watch your back
Blood Gulch's discovery of the Nexus was mostly haphazard, either via random portals or tinkering with the teleporters. No one really bothered to try using it to continue the civil war -- which had ended centuries ago, anyway -- but rather chose to keep to snarking at each other and the other random people of the multiverse. Sometimes, they got involved in Nexus matters, such as the time that Grif got roped into helping rescue some people from a zombie-ravaged London. (Besides the warm fuzzies of helping and the threats by one of the scarier people involved, there was also the enticement of helping loot abandoned banks and liquor stores. That made it fun, and he's taken to making a regular habit of it.)
Eventually, most of the Gulch's population vanished off to parts unknown. Whether they went off into the Nexus to seek their fortune, or had been recalled to be redeployed elsewhere, or simply been devoured by something remains a mystery which Grif doesn't care to investigate. Only one Blue stayed behind, and Grif, as the only Red, arranged a truce with him. With half of the canyon to himself, and no prospects for being forced to fight on the horizon, things seemed to finally be looking up.
Finally free of any imposed requirements, Grif finally got his chance to just sit around and do nothing. It was glorious... for a while. Without the pressure placed upon him by those requirements, the parts of him that he'd suppressed to maintain his air of apathy started to resurface. He began seeking out means to improve himself and find things to do with the skills he'd had to learn that don't involve being forced to fight a senseless war. He was surprised to discover that not only did his business still exist after so many centuries, but that it'd grown and prospered into a corporation comfortably listed somewhere in the also-rans of galactic commerce, and that he was able to readily reacquire his control of it as sole owner, once he established his identity.
Not content to merely be reasonably well-off, Grif registered at the Nexus Clinics, in the hopes that something could be done about his past injuries. They, in turn, put him in touch with Eiko Takashima, whose promises seemed surprisingly good but whose work was also well-recommended in general. He'd also started reading, tinkering, and even training, apparently finding that he was more inclined to do things when they weren't required of him.
About a year after finding the Nexus, though, a problem from back in the old days of the Gulch resurfaced, and it fell to Grif to organize a group of SPARTANs from the Nexus to deal with it. Though unused to running military-style operations, his business skills served him well. Some of his business profits went to pay for custom tranquilizer rounds for his sniper rifle, and a discussion with one of the Nexus' resident geniuses got him a device designed to get rid of the problem once and for all. Grif's attack plan went perfectly... except for the part where the device exploded after doing its job, pulling Grif into a space/time rift.
[edit] 'cause I'm fucking up your program
The rift deposited Grif in some sort of underground laboratory space that was in the midst of a major cataclysm. There was a man next to him, smaller and unaugmented, wearing a suit of armor of a very familiar orange color. The man was dead, though, crushed by rocks that his lighter suit couldn't protect him from. Grif's teleporter gear was burned out, but his armor still had a text connection to the Nexus, through which he was able to find out that the dead man was that world's version of Gordon Freeman, that the place he was in was called Black Mesa, and that he was at ground zero of an alien invasion from which Gordon Freeman was supposed to save the world. It thus fell to Grif to do the job instead, with helpful information from the Gordon in the Nexus, and Gordon's friend Alyx Vance. He succeeded in stopping the threat, and found a way home in the bargain, after which Dr. Takashima was able to perform the rest of her reconstruction work, returning him to full health.
With a new lease on life and a better handle of what he was capable of, Grif came out of the Black Mesa experience with a few experiences he wasn't proud of, but a greater interest in being active in the Nexus. He expanded his business by purchasing a minor electronics company with their own R&D department, and set them to studying the weapons he brought back from Black Mesa and producing other technical solutions for him. Gordon and Alyx told Grif about what had happened, in their version of the universe he'd been in -- namely, a second invasion, worse than the first -- and they began planning to find a way back and prevent it from happening.
When not busy with business or those preparations, he started spending more time either in the Nexus' questions area or paying attention to it via its text terminals. He helped hunt a Predator; began providing training, weaponry, and advice for a fledgling group of Sailor Senshi; took part in a rescue of Eiko's wife. He never wanted to be considered a hero, and actually found any gratitude of that sort fairly uncomfortable. If asked, he would describe himself primarily as a "recovering coward," or possibly an "adventurer."
Eventually, he fell in with a group of people who came to the Nexus at roughly the same time, from different places. Were-folks, mutants, survivors from a world wiped out by a superflu, a dead man brought back to life, they and Grif quickly became close enough to consider one another a sort of pseudo-family. (The "Shenaniclan," as it became known OOCly.) An apartment building was bought in a mundane 21st century Earth's Philadelphia, open for any of them to live in. Grif maintains an apartment there, housing a mini-armory for the building (just in case) and providing an easy vacation spot.
[edit] and if you're stuck-up, you just lucked up
In December of that year, Ginger sent out a call for help to the rest of the family, saying that the leader of her werewolf pack had "fallen," and was working to bring forth a spirit that could destroy the world. Grif and other members of the family gathered up their guns and other supplies and went to Ginger's world's Winnipeg. Together, they fought other fallen werewolves, frozen zombies, and other manifestations of the spirit's power. Time warped between Winnipeg and the Nexus, the few days' fighting stretching out for months in the larger multiverse. Finally restoring order and making the world safe, Our Heroes went back home... and that when things got a little weird for Grif.
In Philadephia, it was late March when they arrived. Grif almost immedately turned around and went to Blood Gulch, and somehow ended up also going back to December in the process. While he was in Winnipeg, he'd done months' worth of text correspondence -- not always in the right order -- but once he got some sleep, he found out that the base's systems believed he'd only been gone for a few days, just like it felt like to him.
Primarily, he discovered this because a pair of agents from ONI (Office of Naval Intelligence, the UNSC's spook-show outfit) had shown up at the base. They informed him that they were aware of his shenanigans in the Nexus, and that they knew who he was and his status as the historical One Drafted Man. However, they also knew that he'd raided a couple of abandoned bases, stealing the cold-weather gear left behind there for people's use in Winnipeg, and that, they said, was the final straw that required them to have a talk with him.
Agents McBride and Holbrook outlined a new understanding, to which Grif added some surprisingly well-negotiated provisions: He would still be allowed to play around in the Nexus, since it's made him a better fighter than anything he'd done in the civil war. They'd even provide him with access, as needed, to ONI's resources, particularly with analysis and production of technology and weapons. In exchange, he would be required to maintain Blood Gulch as his home, and send them reports of any action he found himself involved in. If anything from the Nexus spilled out into their universe, he'd be expected to clean it up. The UNSC, in turn, would leave the Nexus to him, and make no attempt at directly exploiting it, or even accessing it, unless Grif went AWOL and they had to chase him. It wasn't a perfect deal, but it was something akin to an officially recognized free-agent status, so he accepted it, as well as the additional training they offered and recommended so that he could be somewhere with minimal risk of paradoxes while his personal timeline un-looped itself.
[edit] next in line to get fucked up
Once he was back in the Nexus, it was only a few months before he found trouble again. A conversation with an alternate of his old squad's second in command led to the discovery that Kaikaina had signed up with the Army in the hopes of rejoining Grif, and that her ship had gone missing en route to Blood Gulch. In the other universe, she'd survived the 800 year time gap because she used the wrong drive and experienced relativistic time dilation. Grif managed to get Command to start a search operation, although doing so came with a price he'd had to pay soon after by investigating a Nexus event they'd gotten curious about and thus spending a week in a supervillain's bizarre pocket dimension trap (known by those who experienced it as "The Flowerclock").
Later that same year, in the course of helping deal with an army of mecha that had invaded the Nexus with intent to conquer it, Grif received an unexpected promotion to Staff Sergeant. This was primarily to make it easier for McBride and Holbrook to leave him in charge of Red Base, but recognition of how long he'd been in the service played a role as well. In the process, they got him officially seconded from the Army to ONI, Section One. Technically speaking, this makes him an ONI spook as well, but he doesn't play on it unless he has to.
Over the course of a few years, Grif has gone from a reluctant participant in a pointless fake civil war... to being one of the go-to guys of the Nexus for when someone needs a rescue or something needs blowing up. He's got a soft spot for people -- especially teenagers, like he best remembers Kaikaina as -- who get pulled into the heroing life by forces beyond their control. He's a businessman and an adventurer, and maybe one of these days, he'll achieve some level of comfort with being thanked for the work he does.
[edit] no human contact
[edit] and if you interact
- Threnody → Fellow Shenaniclan member. Threnody's level-headed and a little bit scary, which Grif has long since learned to respect.
- Ginger Epps → Fellow Shenaniclan member. Despite being 20 pounds of angry in a 10 pound bag, Ginger's heart is in the right place, and Grif cares about her much as he does his own little sister. She calls him "Tin Can."
- Maria Khirdaji → Maria scares Grif not so much for what she could do to him (even knowing that she has some sort of magic) as for being utterly crazy and inclined to doing things without concern for her own personal safety.
- Gates Keel → Speaking of crazy, at least Gates' Slayer powers give her a decent chance of surviving the things she gets into.
- Candice Monaghan → Martel's wife, or at least close enough at the moment. Seems pretty cool, if prone to getting herself into trouble with her job of dealing with demonic possessions and the like.
"I'm Candice, by the way, apparently Martel doesn't see fit to introduce me to people." - Lucy McClane → The fact that Lucy is a cop's kid who's going in to be a cop herself occasionally makes the criminal instincts of his youth twitch a little, but other than that, she's pretty cool. She sent him a top hat sized to fit with his helmet on, which works pretty well with his armor-scale tuxedo and he totally enjoys that.
"Apparently interfering with intergalactic police is against space laws, who knew!" - Lyla Tzigano → They've only talked over text so far, but they've discussed vengeance, boredom, and apocalypses, and she seems both clever and nice.
"How often do people try to kill you? Damn, man." - Wanda Maximoff → A recent arrival in the Nexus, she co-hosted a Mardi Gras/housewarming party at her place. Friendly, and rolled pretty well with seeing a huge suit of orange armor in a tux show up.
- Ida Wingates → She has "aggressive opinions" on equal treatment and the scariness of women.
"By and large I think this is probably the most honest and mellow response I've ever seen from a man on the subject." - Dara Ivarus → She's reluctant to kill thieves, even when they've stolen from her. Also, she's ex-military and bitter about it. All of these things win points from Grif.
"Well, it sounds like we're both a little too experienced to be comforted by much anyway. Ex-military, I take it? If not, you need to retire."
[edit] your life is on contract
- Fish → Fish is tiny and adorable, which provides an entertaining contrast with Grif's huge armored presence. Grif is usually mildly dismayed by the amount of angst and drama in Fish's life, and wishes he could be happier.
- Martel → Grif enjoys how Martel is up front with how he used to be a big crazy bad-ass villain, but is Feeling Much Better now that he's died and been brought back to life by the Nexus. Martel and Grif have a long-standing cross-training arrangement that their muns haven't done very much with yet.
"I don't think Grif's seen me not a little annoyed." - Ewar → He helps maintain Castle Valdis, including Martel's training school and, to a certain degree, Martel's sanity. He's a good, solid guy, with an entertaining sense of humor, particularly in how he interacts with Martel.
- Luke Skywalker → Coming from an entirely different style of galactic civilization, conversations with Luke are entertaining for comparing and contrasting what space and military action is like for each of them.
"(My Earth friends taught me words like 'suck', speaking of cultural exchanges.)" - Remy LeBeau → Remy put out the open invite on his and Wanda's Mardi Gras/housewarming party. They've only really talked once so far, but Grif heard a little bit of the crazy adventures Remy's had to deal with. Grif can also at least vaguely recognize, under the New Orleans patois, a similar (albeit much more sexual) sort of relaxed, easy-going, open friendliness to what he himself learned in his youth.
- Uther Doul → Doul seems to be a serious but pleasant sort of guy from a world with a weird mish-mash of magic and old-style technology.
"Goodnight, and it's been a rare pleasure to talk to someone who doesn't feel the burning desire to wear too tight 'plastic' pants." - Treize Khushrenada → ...Something's wrong with that boy. Grif's not sure what, but something. He's obviously got a military background, but also an unfamiliar aristocratic layer on top of that, and the something else in between that throws his reactions to Grif's explanations of his past off from what Grif usually expects.
"I'm imagining your military as some kind of bizarre children's cartoon show, to be honest." - Aloysius Dessoir → He's married to an alt of Maria, the concept of which scares Grif. He also has a blue holographic AI who enjoys hassling him, the concept of which Grif finds familiar without fully understanding why.
- Ramirez → Brightly dressed and boisterous, apparently a wanderer and a student of human (and other) nature.
"I like to know a little about the people wherever I am." - Ankhenaten → Another wanderer, although more skittish and prone to dressing darker.
"I am sorry to hear about war, though I am not so ignorant as to believe it is a tragedy that will ever truly be forgotten. Of all the things to hear about other worlds and the future, that is the most expected, is it not? And the most sad, I think." - Mickey Smith → Apparently, he has extensive experience on stumbling into weird time/space situations.
"So, I have to know, what's with the helmet? Style or a warning sign about the local air quality?" - Mordred
- Sagramore
[edit] your best bet is to stay away, motherfucker
This area is reserved for other wiki members to troll in without messing with the actual entry content.
[edit] it's all about the he-said, she-said bullshit
Grif is the creation of Rooster Teeth Productions. He is played by Slarti, who's only in this for fun and doesn't make any money off of it, so please don't sue. Icons of Grif in armor, as well as various elements of his backstory, were created under Microsoft's "Game Content Usage Rules" using assets from the "Halo" game series, © Microsoft Corporation. Brian Thompson belongs to himself, except possibly for whatever portion of his soul Fox and/or the Spelling estate may own for him to have been in "Kindred: The Embraced." Section headings come from the lyrics to "Break Stuff" by Limp Bizkit.
