Shackles McGee

== Titles: All-Tarnir Middleweight Title '57, '58 and '59, Winner of the Gargano Round Robin Rumble 2658, multiple non-legitimate titles

Age: 30 at death, 6 years previously

Class and Level: Rogue 1

Race: Awakened Skeleton (Formerly Human)

Affiliations:None ==

Elvis Ackles
Elvis Ackles (Also known as Elvis McGee, Kyle Morgan, Wayne “Lofty” Bryant, and in his boxing days, “Diablo” Harris) was born in Tarnir 36 years before the exile of the elves. Born poor on the streets, he was taken in at a few weeks old by clerics of Unity, and raised in a workhouse for the first 11 years of his life. Here, he met his two lifelong accomplices, Will and Yancey. Realising a talent for fighting at an early age, he regularly spent nights in the cells from the age of 15 onwards.

These skills served him well as he developed into a mid-level bare knuckle boxer, earning enough prize money to purchase a small bar in the warehouse district of the lower circle of the city called The Shack at age 25, which quickly gained a reputation as a den of rogues and thieves, a place where you could fence a stolen item or buy a black market weapon.

Elvis was briefly married in '57 to a woman named Isabella, the proprietor of a tailor's shop near the Shack. After an explosive courtship and a tempestuous three week honeymoon, within a few hours of moving into their now shared apartment, the couple had an enormous row and Elvis was unceremoniously ejected into the street with most of his belongings, and the marriage was swiftly annulled. However, Shackles found himself rather attached to his wedding suit and kept and wore it continuously until his death, and for some time afterwards.

Involved in minor criminal enterprises for years, he did several jobs for the Gargano crime family, eventually coming to owe them a favour. Through various compounding factors including getting released from prison after getting caught on a job on Vittori Gargano’s say so, Elvis eventually lost the deeds to The Shack to one of Gargano’ underlings in a drunken card game at the age of 30.

He was given a chance to win them back by competing in ‘one last fight’, having been retired for some years, (for competing read: throwing the fight in the fourth round to line the Gargano bookies’ pockets). Just in case something went wrong, he also set up a job with Will and Yancey to rob the house of an upper city merchant. Elvis had acquired a key pressing of the merchant’s safe from a former chambermaid in the house whose ex-fiancé Elvis had ‘dissuaded’ from coming near her again.

On the day of the fight, Elvis had hidden the key in his stash, the location of which was unknown to both Will and Chauncey. Entering the Gargano’s tavern and walking down into the fight ring below, Elvis found that his opponent, formerly a local fighter named Tarek, had been replaced by a Goliath, Augak ‘Thunderfist’ Ululathi, who, in a single blow eight seconds into the first round, punched Elvis’ head pretty much clean off. Obviously, he died.

"Resurrection"
Will and Yancey, understandably, were very upset. Because they knew, unlike Elvis, that they had missed out on the score of a lifetime: in the merchant’s safe was the Golem’s Eye, the biggest ruby between Tarnir and Kingspire. Having no means of getting into the safe otherwise, they were faced with no choice but to turn to a shady wizard in the lower circle named Hadan who said he could return Elvis, and his information, to life…… ‘kind of…… and for a price’.

   Paying all the gold they had, they watched on in horror as Hadan’s magic stripped the flesh from Elvis’ bones, leaving a skeleton that slowly got to its feet, and stood waiting. Questioning Elvis’ skeleton, which had considerable trouble speaking using only magical animus as a tongue, they discovered the location of the stash, (in some hollow bricks in the wallward wall of his childhood workhouse), they retrieved the key, and pulled off the job successfully, landing the biggest score of their lives. They subsequently returned and robbed and beat Hadan to death in order to tidy up all loose ends.

Quite by chance, (or by exposure to the Golem’s Eye, said to be able to bring constructs to life in the hands of a skilled wizard), Elvis’ newfound not-death… stuck. Although he spent some days standing in Hadan’s underground laboratory, trying to configure his scrambled mind into his new body, he eventually regained the power of movement, though speech remained elusive. He spent the better part of a week in front of a mirror, acclimatising to speaking without a tongue, at first practicing saying his own name: “El..vish… Hack… Ack… lesh… Elvishacklesh… Elvishacklesh.” This mangled speech gave birth to his new name: Shackles.

Shackles found that no one came looking for Hadan, and he took the tiny dingy apartment as his own, realising that with The Shack in the hands of the Garganos, and Will and Yancey having fled the city after what he perceived as their betrayal, that he was alone and penniless, (although no longer needing to eat or drink, he found his living expenses drastically reduced). Taking a surname from one of his favorite aliases, Shackles McGee rejoined the underbelly of Tarnir, (albeit at first under disguise as a cloaked and masked mystic from another land by the name of Arastoo Al Sadat), as he didn’t really know what else to do. He also began to try to style his skeletal persona as a gentleman thief, although this didn’t quite transfer into thought and deed, and Shackles remained as much of a brawler in life as in death, much happier to knock out a guard than sneak past one, (after all, it must be the concussion, skeletons don’t wear jaunty hats).

Post-Death Activity
After three years of his new life (or death), and with the war with the Elves in full swing, he then turned to war profiteering, finding a decent amount of money in it. He also found that arms dealers aren’t terribly interested in what colour your skin is, or even if you have any, as long as the colour of their pockets is gold. Continuing with this angle for another couple of years, Shackles was thoroughly annoyed when the Elves surrendered, as his business suddenly began to collapse.

It was at this point, in a dive bar near Whaletown, that he again ran into Will and Yancey. Each was equally surprised to see the other, but for very different reasons. As it transpired, Will and Yancey had found the Golem’s Eye extremely difficult to fence, and ended up being payed only 8% of a small fortune, which through cards, whores and a fraudulent, but very persuasive, alchemist, was gone six years later in the bar, where Shackles actually had to buy his old accomplices a round.

The two thieves convinced Shackles to join them for one last job, for old time’s sake, and missing feeling a connection with another person, Shackles agreed. What he failed to realise, was that the ‘job’, was stealing a crate full of misappropriated goods… from the Garganos. Sneaking aboard the ship and finding themselves hopelessly outmatched by the Garganos’ many henchmen, Will was captured and brutally executed on deck before being thrown into the sea, while Yancey dived in of his own volition, fleeing away from the ship along the wharfs and getting commendably far.

Shackles meanwhile, escaped his pursuers on the ship by diving into an open crate and collapsing into a pile of bones under the straw. Hiding for several hours, he didn’t dare emerge even when he felt the weight of a large number of cheese wheels being placed on top of him, or heard the lid of the crate being nailed shut above. The crate was then loaded on to a different ship that was bound for White Haven, arriving there under the management of one of the more legitimate Gargano business interests, and being sold to a Halfpenny merchant buying supplies for the voyage to Elfstralia. Safe from the Garganos, Shackles tried to escape from the crate, but found that it had been packed tight into the hold of the ship, fenced in on all sides by similar cargo. The subsequent four weeks spent in the cramped, dark confines of the crate, with only a solitary rat for company, gave Shackles ample opportunity for introspection, and by the time someone heard his knocking and broke the crate open, he had sworn an oath to never commit a crime again, for no reason other than it had only thus far made his life, and subsequent undeath, extremely bloody miserable.

It was time for Shackles to go straight.