User Profile

And shepherds we shall be,
For Thee, my Lord, for Thee.
Power hath descended forth from Thy hand,
That our feet may swiftly carry out Thy command.
So we shall flow a river forth to Thee
And teeming with souls shall it ever be.
In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti.

-- Boondock Saints


Legendary Turk aka 'Duke' for apurgatorium

Player Information
Name: Hane
Livejournal: hane
AIM: HaneShinohara
Email: hane_irregular_hunter@yahoo.com

Character Information

Name: the Duke (Il Duce)
Real Name: Iskander Kaplan, now Alexander Kaplan
Age: Undisclosed, probably between 30-40s.
Alias(es): the Legendary Turk, the God of Death, El Tigre, that guy, Indignation 'Indi' Jones, Jim Bonds. Currently under the name Sikander Valentine.
Series: FFVII Before Crisis
Timeline: post BC
Canon Bio link: Gunshot Romance profile


Purgatorium Info
- Lives at: house on the lower level that used to belong to Veld and Vincent
- With: nobodyyyy
- Works at: White Fang (director)
- Relationship status: CLAIMS TO BE SINGLE, chasing Sumeragi (inebriatingly). Denying forever and ever and ever that he's still in love with ex Vincent Valentine (mercyrule).
- # of deaths: 0
- Memories lost:


History:
Canon: As his name suggests, this player is a legend amongst his fellow Turks. A man with intensive battle experience, he played a large role during the war with Wutai. What happened there is a mystery, though, because soon after his last battle in 1999, he was placed under a kind of house arrest by Shin-Ra and spent the remainder of the war in Costa del Sol. The so-called imprisonment doesn't seem to have bothered him, as he spent a lot of his free time getting to know the ladies of the resort town.

There is a complex relationship between Legend and Tseng, though what happened between them to warrant Tseng's opinion of him is at the current time unknown. What we do know is that Legend was Tseng's mentor, "one of the people who taught Tseng what he knows today."

Legend uses bombs as his primary weapon, though he is versed in other forms of combat as well. He hails from Junon.


ALL OF THE UNCANON:
Born Iskander Kaplan, naturalized Alexander Kaplan when he arrived on the continent. Parents and his baby sister Irina moved to Junon when he was young, where his daddy got a job as a construction worker and eventually engineer for the ShinRa development projects in the area. Explosives being the most exciting part of any building process, he paid way too much attention when he tagged along with his father and his father's co-workers at the sites. As a young man he finally landed a job in Midgar's Urban Development department as a nameless, faceless low level clerk, bored to death by endless reports and filing and excluded from any actual design work by those with more formal education and less incomprehensible accents. He didn't dare quit, as he was helping support his family, but amused himself by indulging his dubious hobby of building homemade miniature explosives out of anything he could find and successfully sneaking them past ShinRa's security.

Had a run in with two young Turks when someone in his office was accused of selling sensitive information, and almost wound up getting shot when the accused made a run for it and grabbed the handiest person nearby to use as a shield. The encounter, and more importantly the shooter, left an extremely significant impression that would stay with him for the rest of his life.

Arrested not long after that when someone accidentally bumped his desk too hard and the entire thing exploded. This was the end of his possible career as an engineer, and probably would have been the end of any career, fired and jailed or executed as a terrorist by ShinRa, but the incident caught the eye of the old Director of the Turks and Alex was scouted instead. Faced with the choice of becoming a Turk or getting charged as a terrorist, he sensibly chose the suit. His family was never informed.

Same as in his old department, his accent and lowly background isolated him from the rest of the recruits, setting him up early as the brash lone wolf type that didn't have much use for teamwork, rules, partners, or other Turks named Veld, who cordially despised him right back. He got into a lot of fights over his apparent inability to take anything seriously, but over the next few years lost his accent and exchanged his name for a title, Il Duce, given to him by his enemies, and refined his natural talents to an intuitive genius with explosives. His specialty was in surgical strikes, using the bare minimum of force and allowing natural circumstances to do the rest, which he felt was more artistic and skillful. Many of his jobs were never identified as bombings but accidents. He was also well known for being able to create explosive components out of anything, including monster blood and the type of scrap one could find in a dumpster.

When a Turk by the name of Vincent Valentine disappeared, anyone who was around at the time might have assumed that Duke's abrupt return to Midgar was at the order of the Director, and that assumption might have been correct. Duke never answered anyone honestly about his reasons for coming back and why, for the next six months, he could be found every now and then physically present in the office and only took assignments close to Midgar. He and Veld didn't argue any less, at least in view of the other Turks, and in fact they probably fought more. And eventually Duke vanished again, back to his old habits of not turning up at the office for months at a time.

Time passed. Veld got married. Duke got married. The old Director the Turks stepped down and nominated his Assistant as successor, as per tradition, but there were some rumblings of dissent about letting the former hellraiser have the position, even though he had changed considerably since Vincent's disappearance. Never one to participate in office politics, Duke surprised everyone by stepping forward to announce that if Veld was not allowed to succeed according to the Director's wishes, the Turks could go looking for a new number one operative. The threat was probably empty, given what had forced Duke to become a Turk in the first place, but it made an impression all the same.

The war when it came chewed up Shinra personnel and civilians alike and for some reason kept sparing Duke, at first to his relief and after a few years of utter hell to his despairing rage. He picked up scars, shrapnel enough to kill him about five times over, paranoia, some obsessive compulsive behaviors, an unhealthy reliance on alcohol, enough guilt and resentment to sink a ship and a huge rift with his wife which would eventually lead to their messy, messy divorce.

Duke was briefly put in charge of Tseng's training during the war, which didn't work so well since Duke insisted that Tseng come to him at the Wutai front, if Shinra was really going to waste his time with training kids. Their personalities clashed immediately. Duke was cavalier, unconventional, arrogant, openly scornful of Shinra, rookies, 'Director's pets,' and generally a loose cannon that considered Wutai his own personal sandbox, not to mention responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Tseng's former countrymen. In short, just about everything Tseng couldn't stand. They were happy to be rid of each other after the training.

Right around the time of Veld's defection, Duke was conveniently pulled from active duty in Wutai and sent on a 'vacation' to Costa Del Sol for the remainder of the war, surrounded by sun, beach, and undercover guards. No one said the words 'suspected of treason' or even 'war crimes,' as Duke had frequently acted outside of orders (even to the point of targeting Shinra personnel), but no one had to say anything for the implication to remain.

At the time of Before Crisis, Duke and Veld are some of the last few members of the 'old guard' of Turks, having watched nearly all their comrades die or retire during the war. Duke pretends not to share Veld's deep concern for the current generation of Turks and still refuses to take a partner, spawning all kinds of rumors about some horrible tragedy where he got his first partner killed, etc etc, none of which are true. He is currently divorced from his wife Roxanne and has two young boys Connor and Murphy, whom he adores above all else. He and his ex-wife have always had a very strained relationship, as Roxanne became pregnant accidentally (or perhaps not so accidentally) and then refused to even consider aborting. She never ordered him to the altar in so many words, but she accepted his reluctant proposal instantly and then found herself married to a man who was never home and never answered questions about his job. She doesn't know for certain that he is a Turk, but she suspects he does something similarly immoral for Shinra, and never lets an opportunity pass to accuse him of infidelity and lies and murder.

Nobody knows anything particularly factual about his personal life except Veld and to a lesser degree Tseng, as his files were sealed when he became a double O first class operative. The name Alexander Kaplan is itself a secret known only to Veld, possibly Hojo, and anybody that Veld might have told or had access to sealed files. 'Duke' has been his working name for so many years that most people aren't even aware it isn't his real one.



Personality:
Duke is a charming, smiling, scheming bastard, or at least that's the face he usually gives out to the public, since any superspy worth his salt can take personas on and off like hats and Duke is considered one of Shinra's best, known specifically for pulling off the impossible. He'll shamelessly hit on anything in a dress but rarely takes the game further unless he's drunk or very depressed or needs information; one of the few constant traits is his unwillingness to get close to people in case he needs to kill them later. Anything he does can be assumed to have a motive behind it, or maybe three or five. Under the cavalier attitude he is a brutally efficient mass-murderer, methodical on his missions to the point of neurosis and obsession, and not above immorality or outright cruelty even though the guilt will gnaw at him afterwards. He's also the guy that killed targets on both sides of the war, in the cases of Shinra personnel that were getting in his way, prolonging the war through stupidity, or just happened to be Bad Men getting away with Bad Things. Duke has serious issues with Bad Men despite being one of them, and has more than once deeply unnerved himself with how easy it is to accomplish terrible acts if you simply remove a few mental limitations.

Or, one could say, a few human limitations.

Duke is a frightening genius with homebrew explosives, especially ones cooked up from bubblegum and twine and bits and pieces of monsters as well as not-always-available technology, and when in the suit (and sometimes not) he is always, always, always considering the details of the next mission. Even when there isn't one. Wutai branded him deeply and left him a little less than sane even after he was pulled out of the jungle. He's fully aware of the fact that he's one of those Crazy Veterans who spooks at shadows and sees enemies and conspiracy and evil intention everywhere, but in his case the paranoia is a little more justified, and he tries not to let it bother him.

This doesn't really work, hence the alcohol and policies of utter dishonesty.

He once had some hope of eventually retiring from the Turks and trying to salvage the mess he's made of his domestic situation, but left the war secretly afraid that he's too conditioned (or damaged) to ever leave the spy life behind and suffers from black depression and alcoholism.

All of these are the reasons why he let Roxanne take his sons without much of a fight when they got their divorce. He's feared all his life that he will be a very, very, very bad father and tries to make up for it by keeping an eye on the younger Turks, except when he doesn't, which is a lot. He is infamous for Never Being Around. He gets frustrated with the rookies easily and would rather leave them to their own bullshit and egos when push comes to shove. Veld is their babysitter. Duke would rather protect them from far enough away that he doesn't have to listen to their backtalk.

As might be expected, Duke has very little actual loyalty to ShinRa and its asshat President, remembering his days at a dead end thankless clerk job, and denies any kind of deeply binding connections with his fellow Turks, although by the end of the war his attitude has changed to an obsession with protecting the 'kids' because he felt he was the only one that could. He lies at the drop of a hat when the conversation turns to anything about his personal life. He'll give you any name except his own and has eighty thousand plausible or implausible stories. Veld is about the only person he feels any inclination to be honest with (and the only person allowed to call him Alex), if only because Veld has been to Junon and had tea with his mama and told her all kinds of shiny lies about what a wonderful employee 'dear Iskander' was. The Kaplan family, obviously, knows nothing of Duke's occupation. Mama Kaplan, under the impression that Veld is Duke's supervisor in Whatever Department He's With Now Oh He Must Have Said But I Just Can't Remember, sends him cookies every so often. This aggravates Duke like nothing else.

Tseng is still a damn brat, and will be even when he's thirty. Sorry Tseng.

His relationship with Vincent is exceedingly complicated. Though they hardly knew each other outside of the arguments that Veld and Duke got into every now and then, once Vincent disappeared he became a highly significant figure in Duke's life, being the reason behind Veld's driving guilt and eventually coming to symbolize every Turk that lost their life to the Company's secrets and carelessness. Duke's standing orders during the war were to act as a barrier between the Company and outside threats, taking care of things before they actually became dangerous and such, and by the war's end his guilt and obsession had pushed him into considering himself personally responsible for the safety of the Turks. All of them. Even the dead ones that he had nothing to do with.




Appearance:



Abilities
- enhanced speed/strength/endurance via Jenova infection
- genius explosives expert


Sin
Pride, baby. And some Envy.

Friends (8):

Friend of (325):