| Introduction
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He didn't want to be a villain. He wanted even less to be a cliche villain. But now here he his, directing a multinational biomedical conglomerate, pursuing shadowy and ethically dubious projects on the side, and hobnobbing with dangerous, occasionally deranged individuals who would be more than happy to sweep him out of the way of their path to power. Also there's an idealistic, rather punchy teenager who takes issue with his activities.
But well, if life hands you lemons, there's no point in pretending otherwise: you might as well run with it -- and while you're at it, track the lemons back to their source and make them pay.
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| The Caleswoods
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Cameron Ciaphas Caleswood comes from a complicated family.
The Caleswood family can trace its history back through centuries of frankly Shakespearean bloodshed and betrayal. If there was a violent conflict in or around Europe since the early Middle Ages, there was probably a Caleswood involved. Or more than one, often on different sides, officially or otherwise. Throughout history the fortunes of the House of Caleswood have risen to great heights and fallen to great depths -- but the family has always survived, and eventually clawed its way back to wealth and noteriety within a few generations.
And if not violence, then the Caleswood family is also known for scandal, for pettiness and excess. In more modern times they were known to be involved with the occult, and with a variety of bizarre events that in retrospect were probably mutant activity.
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| History
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All of this history leads to Cameron, presently the last surviving member of the Caleswood household and honestly something of a white sheep. Despite his violent and and ignoble ancestry, Cameron managed to keep his head down and stay out of trouble for most of his childhood and adolescence, preferring his studies to the eccentric proclivities of his parents and elder siblings. While they were engaged with politics and intrigue and debauchery, Cameron went to medical school. Then he pursued a degree in biochemestry, which bought him a few more years worth of shelter in the dull world of academia. Sure, they had their politics and drama, but it was quiet and petty and hardly anyone ever got murdered.
Cameron doesn't like to talk about the events that lead to him being the last surviving heir to the Caleswood name, and certainly the truth of the matter is far from public. Whatever happened, the Caleswood family tree took a vigorous pruning over the course of a year or so, with deaths varying from the quiet and natural to the bizarre and suspicious. Eventually Cameron was the only one left, inheriting (among other things) a majority share in a number of profitable corporations and a membership in the Hellfire Club despite his best attempts to avoid it.
And perhaps he could have continued to avoid it. It's not clear what provoked Cameron to leave the quiet academic life, but leave it he did, taking charge of his family's holdings and restructuring the loose collection of businesses and side-projects into the profitable Daedalus Group, now a major player in the biomedical and pharmaceutical industry. His business has been relatively legitimate since, though the specter of older, less ethical projects that may not have been entirely discontinued remains.
(Additionally, his family's ties to organized crime /may/ have required some vigorous and explosive cleaning up. At least a few current mafia bosses owe their positions to Cameron detonating their predecessors, with the understanding that they are to leave him and his interests /alone./)
Now, the last adult Caleswood walks among the rich and powerful, playing the game he'd once tried his hardest to avoid -- a game of power and intrigue, or property and vice, played against the ambitious and the mad. Unlike many of his competitors, Cameron has no agenda, no vision of a world he is trying to create. He's just a scholar who'd like nothing better if all of the masterminds and schemers around him would go and destroy themselves, so he could get back to scholaring. And if necessary, he'll give them a little push: he's trying to raise a child, you know, and he'd like them to be out of the way before his son gets old enough to be involved in this nonsense.
Also, he needs to prepare for the day when the thing that murdered his family realizes it missed one, and comes back.
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| The Hounds of Culain
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Among the projects he inherited was the one that had lead to the family's demise. Once, the assortment of unusual Caleswood family associates included a powerful metamorph. In the early 90s a bright idea was had, a scheme to revolutionize medicine as we know it: by using samples of this person's tissue and emulating the signals that control it, one could make any number of powerful restorative treatments possible. (And by keeping the grafted tissue under observation and influence until it is fully replaced by native cells, the risk of the treated region growing into a horrible Lovecraftian carnivorous super-tumor is basically negligible!) Thus, an early incarnation of the Daedalus Corporation set out to change medicine forever.
Unfortunately, this research was cut off before all the kinks could be worked out, as it ran into two unforeseen complications. The immediate consequence was that the source was...rather offended by his "gifts" being appropriated in such a way, and communicated his displeasure rather emphatically. It was these events that lead to Cameron taking over leadership of the project and incorporating it into the other surviving family assets. The other complication took much longer to become obvious: while minor treatments in which the foreign tissue was quickly disposed of tended to be stable, one such trial -- a fertility treatment -- began to yield unexpected results years later, when several of the children of treated individuals began to manifest a crippled, inhibited form of the original Hound's mutation. Even worse, the clumsy, irreversible shapeshifting of these secondary Hounds had a terrible habit of causing brain damage, quickly leading to victims degenerating into feral, ravenous monsters.
Naturally, the revelation that a Daedalus treatment had turned innocent children into mutants (nevermind terrible abominations) would be a frightful blow to the Group's public image. Thus, under Cameron's direction Daedalus began to gather up manifested and potential Hound-spawn, working to retain those who were too far gone and salvage something useful from the situation, as well as keep the whole fiasco out of the public eye. Fortunately, they found at least one young woman who'd managed to keep control of her shapeshifting and retain her mind: unfortunately, she wasn't particularly keen on sticking around and had a teleporting twin sister who helped break her out of their NYC complex. A number of the feral Hounds escaped in the confusion as well, and an effort is presently under way to (discreetly) retrieve them from the city's sewers.
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| Connections
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Friends
- Michael Saint-Quentin: Oldest friend in the world. Trusted implicitly: they've been through enough that if Mike was going to stab him in the back, he'd have done it decades ago.
- Zarita Sara: Less of a known quantity and a newer edition to the Daedalus family, but she's been well vetted and seems to be fitting in well.
Foes
- Jill and Lily Francis: Children these days. Why must they be so difficult? And worse, Jill seems to be taking after her progenitor. Obviously she is in need of guidance and direction. Ideally, this direction will be "pointed towards other people she can go be a Hero at."
- Norman Osborn: Complete lunatic, reminds him of his older brother Charles. Dangerous, but will probably hang himself if given enough rope. Note to self: lend Norman some rope, maybe teach him some knots.
- Sebastian Shaw: Another ambitious, ruthless Captain of Industry, and a self-made man to boot. Like Norman, but with the additional advantage of sanity.
- Emma Frost: The pleasant, motherly event planner of the HFC. Sweet, caring, and probably the most dangerous of the three. Apparently she's the (ahem) white sheep of the Frost family, a household almost as bad as his: he might even see her as a kindred spirit, if he had any reason to believe she wouldn't be perfectly happy to throw him to the wolves.
- Lets put the rest of the Hellfire Club here too, for the sake of completeness.
- Project Prometheus: Government funded mad science, what could possibly go wrong? A dangerous political entity -- and worse, a competitor. Fortunately this problem too may be self-solving, as they seem to piss off powerful mutants as a matter of routine. Note to self: do not be anywhere near this when it explodes, poke only with a very long stick.
- Weapon X: Even more mad science, and a greater willingness to mangle people when they get inconvenient. Thankfully more focused on killing foreigners.
- The Government In General: Either they're bad people and are elsewhere on this list, or they're good people and object to Daedalus taking necessary measures to protect itself and its interests. Government: get in thy pocket!
- The Public In General: They just get so angry about things, and it's never the things they should be! Come on, there's more room in the pocket, you can get in there too.
- Homeopaths: Fine, so Big Pharma doesn't get much bigger than the Daedalus Group, but our treatments actually do something, you spineless charlatans.
- Reed Richards: "Oh look at me, watch as I fill a swimming pool with my degrees and frolick around in it! Did you know I have an IQ of fifty thousand?" Yes, we know because you've told us. Victor has his own, ah, eccentricities, but Caleswood is inclined to side with him on this one.
- Tony Stark: An arrogant playboy jock of an engineer, essentially Caleswood's natural enemy.
- The Caleswood Family: A noble lineage! More than a thousand years of murderers and madmen. The fact that they're all dead is a blessing; the fact that they explicitly bequeathed "their sins" to Cameron is less so.
- Cuhullin.
And everything in between
- Oh, Caleswood remembers the days when he could afford to be ambivalent about people. They were nice. On the bright side, bookkeeping is easier when everyone's an enemy.
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| Gallery
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[[Image:|x150px]]
[[Image:|x150px]]
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| Doctor Cameron Ciaphas Caleswood
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| Codename
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None
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| Birthdate
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11-11-1969
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| Species
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Human
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| Affiliation
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Director of the Daedalus Group, Black Rook of the Hellfire Club
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| Alignment
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Strategic Neutral
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| Powers
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Money. Class. Sanity.
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| Occupation
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None
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| RP Hooks
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| The Future of Medicine - While the Daedalus Group does not directly manage any hospitals or clinics, it acts as a supplier to many and runs research programs at many more. And while Caleswood himself doesn't directly supervise many of its day-to-day operations, he may very well venture down to oversee a particularly interesting matter.
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| A Dangerous Game - Out of necessity, he also keeps a close eye on the political environment -- and the shadowy web of intrigue that underlies it. Information is power, and Caleswood does as best he can to keep abreast of what the other players are doing, and is more than willing to nudge things in a different direction if he thinks it would benefit his interests.
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| In The Wrong Club - When Caleswood took over his family's fortune and projects, he also inherited their seat on the Hellfire Club's Inner Circle. Unfortunately, the current Inner Circle is mostly full of stuffy old rich dudes, while the conspiracy plotting to supplant them is full of the young, the ambitious, and the superpowered. Caleswood doesn't bear the current Circle any particular loyalty...but his position among their ranks makes him a big target and a bigger liability, and it will take some deft maneuvering and more than a little luck to escape the impending coup with his life, mind, and organization intact.
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| Hounds, Biting At His Heels - There are feral monster-spawn loose in the sewers, a shapeshifting teenager with a chip on her shoulder has slipped her leash, and somewhere out there the original Hound is lurking, biding his time with no indication that he's laid his grudge to rest.
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