Morphine
From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe
Morphine was designed on May 1, 2019 on the Everlasting server.
| [[Image:|300px|]] | |
| Morphine | |
| Player: RobotoHQ/Holygiant | |
| Origin: | Science |
|---|---|
| Archetype: | Scrapper |
| Threat Level: | ? |
| Personal Data | |
| Real Name: | Nicholas Brandt |
| Known Aliases: | Confidential |
| Species: | Human |
| Age: | Unknown |
| Height: | 6'4 |
| Weight: | 230 lbs. |
| Eye Color: | Unknown |
| Hair Color: | Unknown |
| Biographical Data | |
| Nationality: | American |
| Occupation: | Mercenary |
| Place of Birth: | Unknown, possibly southern U.S. |
| Base of Operations: | Cap Au Diable, Rogue Isles |
| Marital Status: | Unknown |
| Known Relatives: | Confidential |
| Known Powers | |
| Almost completely numb to pain | |
| Known Abilities | |
| Expert in hand-to-hand combat | |
| Equipment | |
| Morphine auto-injector, metallic right arm, hand grenades | |
| ' | |
Contents |
Introduction
If there's anywhere Nico Brandt can say he's intimately familiar with, it's a hospital bed.
He laid in a hospital bed when his right arm was broken in a big mixed martial arts loss.
He laid in a hospital bed just a year later when he lost the function in his arm to a Rikti blade contracting for Vanguard.
And he laid in a hospital bed after having his mind flayed by a psychic in the Rogue Isles, where he nearly died on the street.
Hospital beds are more of a home to him than anywhere else, at least. Hospital beds are where his old life ended and his new life began. No longer another nameless soldier of fortune, like thousands of others before him who were never loved enough as a kid and ended up falling into an endless trap of seeking glory and forwarding the military industrial complex.
Now, he was special. Not just a drug addict, either.
He was Morphine.
History
Professional fighter
Nico's backstory is much like a lot of his former peers in the fighting community - to a point.
He had a rough childhood in a bad neighborhood. His father gambled incessantly, buying hundreds of lottery tickets at once. So, he turned to fighting to handle it, and found himself on the receiving end of plenty of punches. He struggled with fighting, and was considering hanging up his gloves for good.
Until one of those lottery tickets turned out to be right.
His father was ecstatic. Years of wasted money were finally worth it. The neighborhood was gone, and Nico didn't have to keep fighting.
But his father pushed him back to the cage with a new, highly-paid trainer in a nice new gym. He didn't have the option to quit - this was suddenly a new moneymaking scheme for his already rich father. Nico had little recourse, and ended up fighting his way into a good position for a junior amateur.
As a young adult, Nico was still wholly dependent on his father. He dropped out of high school to pursue fighting and kept punching and kicking his way into the professional circuit, backed by his father. By 19, he was a fully fledged championship fighter, and by 24, he had his first real title.
Through the last few years of his career, Nico feuded with a fighter named Ricardo "Thresh" Gondria, a large, hulking man about a head taller than the already imposing Nico. He lost to him the first time by decision.
The next few years would involve constant boasting, posturing and verbal battles between the two men, both insisting that they would knock each other out. Nico confronted him with a bat at a press event and was escorted out of the venue. Nico vowed that he would never let the fight go by decision again.
To be fair, it never did go to decision again. Instead, at 27, Nico fought Thresh for a championship belt. But in only 46 seconds, Thresh had him on the ground and snapped his right arm clean in half - effectively ending his career as a professional fighter and humiliating him in front of millions. Years of chronic pain were to follow.
Nico was devastated. He spent a lot of time contemplating what his life would be like now, all from his hospital bed. But he learned that he really liked the stuff they were feeding him through the intravenous tube. It made him feel free for the first time in his life.
He soon learned that Thresh was discovered as a mutant - a metahuman with powers too far beyond the average fighter to participate in normal human fighting. Thresh was barred from ever competing at that level again and had his titles stripped. But things were too late for Nico - once he was out of the hospital and on a regimen of opioids, he fell into deep drug addiction.
His father was dead by now. Without a realistic shot of fighting again, Nico decided his best bet would be training new fighters, but his impatience and low pay made this unsustainable. He needed a way to make good money - or at least a way to sustain his addiction.
Soldier of Fortune
So Nico took hire as a private military contractor, training soldiers around the world in hand-to-hand combat and running occasional security detail. His travels led him to Africa and Asia, and he made decent money doing it. It was a way to keep himself busy, to give himself purpose, and, most importantly, to keep him on a steady supply of morphine. Working closely with the medical division of the contractor, he was able to get ample supply of his drug of choice.
But in 2002, everything changed.
On a break from contracting, Nico spent time in the booming Paragon City, where he used to train. He witnessed the Ritki invasion through the stained glass of his apartment. His first reaction was to take a fistful of pills and lie back on the bed.
Lying there, staring at the off-white popcorn ceiling as the building shook and released flakes of asbestos, Nico realized that this was his next venture. As long as he - and the rest of humanity - could ride out this storm, he could take advantage of it. War is always an opportunity.
And in weeks, Vanguard was formed by the United Nations. Nico found himself with a rifle in his hand despite his addiction and relatively limited mobility in his right arm.
But this was a good opportunity to make every excuse he could to run back to the doctor and get some more of that sweet nectar.
For weeks during the Rikti War, Morphine would find any way he could to injure himself just enough to get to the field hospital. He never managed to get administered morphine fairly, but he did convince one doctor to give it to him for a minor wound. The rest he simply stole from stockrooms and supply crates.
Powers & Abilities
It may seem like a clear disadvantage for one to be addicted to opiates, but Morphine has pushed it to his advantage. After spending years in hospital beds on pain medication for various field injuries, he worked with a scientist in the Rogue Isles to develop a device that feeds him morphine through his semi-synthetic right arm. The auto-injector is designed to give him morphine when he would otherwise receive pain.
Morphine became a hand-to-hand expert after years of professional fighting, and trained soldiers and mercenaries through the years in the art of melee combat. He prefers to use his hands instead of firearms because of the personal nature of fighting hand-to-hand - and the fact that it feeds his ego more than bullets.
Morphine is also in remarkable shape. He uses most of his money to fund a drug regimen that combines copious amounts of opiates, buprenorphine (to survive) and a form of human growth hormone. It's likely that he hasn't been sober for years.
