Shaun Philip Mason

User Name/Nick: Zoe
User DW: nutterzoi
E-mail/Plurk/Discord/PM to a character journal/alternate method of contact: nutterzoi
Other Characters Currently In-Game: n/a

Character Name: Shaun Mason
Series: Newsflesh
Age: Mid twenties
From When?: Shaun comes to the Barge from a zombie-hunting expedition designed to help a member of his team get his field license for journalism. He covered the team for their escape, then was sadly overwhelmed by zombies. (This is a headcanon death–he does survive this event in canon.)

Inmate Justification: Shaun hears the voice of his dead sister in his head (and we are not talking a ghost situation–he is Unwell), and is violent with anyone who suggests that this is not a healthy coping mechanism. He is pursuing revenge for her murder with a single-mindedness that doesn't care if other people get hurt along the way, and has no intention to outlive his quest.

Arrival: Shaun has agreed to come to the Barge instead of dying forever–he can't die until he avenges his sister!

Abilities/Powers: Shaun, like everyone else in his world, is infected with the dormant state of the Kellis-Amberlee virus. Unlike most people in his world (and unbeknownst to Shaun himself), he is immune to conversion. Zombie bites and other exposure to live-state Kellis-Amberlee will not cause him to become a zombie, the way they would most of the rest of his world. Otherwise? He’s just a normal twenty-something guy, in the kind of shape that allows him to lead a fairly active--some (his sister) might even say hyper active--life.

Inmate Information: First of all, Shaun is Not Well. He has been hearing a voice in his head (his sister, George) since her murder, and has no interest at all in accepting any kind of help that might make that voice go away. He does not know how to live without her, does not want to, and is very frank about the fact that he would kill himself without her presence. He can be violent with people who suggest that this is not healthy (including his employees and friends).

Since George's murder, he has been very single-minded in his pursuit of vengeance for her death. Despite the fact that he has friends, employees, and a whole entire journalism website to look after, the one thing he cares about is making the people who killed George pay, and he would cheerfully watch the world burn as long as he knew he took the culprits down with him. Most of the work of After the End Times–the site he started with his sister–has fallen to other people, and he has stepped back to a mainly administrative role–very unlike his previously active lifestyle.

CW ADOPTED SIBLING INCEST. Shaun is entirely in love with George. The two had been in a romantic and sexual relationship for several years before her death, though they kept it a secret between the two of them–for obvious reasons. His inability to get over her death is certainly related to the fact that he sees her as the love of his life, and can't imagine his life without her. He knows it's not healthy, and he does not care.

He also has Anger Issues, and tends to lash out at others when he's feeling thwarted. This can be expressed in violence, sarcasm, and… general meanness. He is not nice when he thinks that people are getting in the way of doing what he sees as the right thing. He isn't a constant rageball, though–he can be really charming! Just… not when the people around him are wrong.

Path to Redemption: First of all, Shaun will need to recognize that he can still live a meaningful life without George, and that–despite what his brain is telling him–she actually wouldn't want him to die with her. Yes, she was obsessed with the Truth, and would want him to find out what happened and expose the conspiracy that caused her death, but she wouldn't want him to destroy himself. This is going to be really hard for him to accept, because he knows that she wouldn't want to live without him either. They are extremely codependent.

He would also benefit from learning some impulse control. His tendency to lash out in violence and act before thinking tends to get him into trouble, and he's never really learned how to not jump first and ask questions later. He's never really needed to. George has always been his impulse control.

As for wardening, he's going to be very skeptical of the inmate/warden process. Anyone who tries to be very controlling is going to meet a lot of resistance and not be very effective (though this would undoubtedly be fun to play out!). The best style for him would involve a lot of talking him through his bad behavior, and ~emotional difficulty~, and calling him out when he's being a jackass. Which is… a lot. He will be resistant, and it will take time to earn his trust, because he has massive trust issues, but he can be won over. He only mostly hates humanity, not completely.

When he arrives on the Barge, Shaun will be very angry–both about George's death, and the fact that he managed to die before finding out who did it and making them pay. What he wants more than anything is to wrap this whole experience up and get home, so he can go back to rooting out the conspiracy that led to George's death.

History:

The end of the world came and went in the summer of 2014, when the cure for cancer met the cure for the common cold, and spawned a zombie uprising. The dead rose, attacked the living, and at least forty percent of the world’s population was killed. The survivors moved on, and learned to cope with the Kellis-Amberlee virus that now infected the whole world, and the zombies that rose when people died and the virus activated. The world changed.

And all that happened before Shaun was even born. Rude, right?

Shaun was one of the orphans of the uprising, adopted as an infant as one half of a boy/girl set by a journalist couple, who were trying to create the Perfect Family™ after the death of their son Philip in a zombie dog attack. The Masons were pioneer bloggers in the new age of journalism, and they used their family ruthlessly to keep their ratings up. Shaun caught onto this much more quickly than Georgia--one of the few times in their lives that he was quicker on the uptake than she was. They weren’t a family. They were a business.

Despite the lack of parental warmth, there were definite benefits to the arrangement. The Masons were adamant about raising Shaun and Georgia the way they wanted to--which meant as much freedom and fresh air as possible, in a world circumscribed by blood tests and hazard zones. They wanted them to be unafraid of the outside world the way most of the population was. They succeeded. And when Georgia decided she was going to become a blogger, well. Shaun wasn’t going to be left behind. They’d always been inseparable, and that wasn’t going to change. George became a “newsie” (just the facts, ma’am), while Shaun became an “Irwin,” meaning he found dead things to poke with sticks for the amusement of the public at large.

The most important thing they got from their parents, though, was each other. They had been inseparable from the moment they were adopted, sharing a room until they were teenagers, and then sleeping in adjoining rooms afterward. As far as Shaun was concerned, Georgia was the only family he wanted or needed, and he didn’t feel the need to explain that to anyone who might think it was weird that his sister was still his best friend. Nor did he feel the need to explain the physical aspect of their relationship to anyone (not that it was an issue. They kept things quiet to avoid scandal and disownment). Still, as far as Shaun was concerned, it was their life, and they had the blood tests to prove they weren’t biologically related, so the rest of the world could go to hell. Georgia was the only person he loved in any meaningful way, and he would follow her to the end of the world.

Then they got the biggest break of their young blogging careers. They were selected, along with their friend and colleague (and technical and espionage expert) Buffy, to be the blogging team for presidential hopeful Senator Ryman. And just like that, they had their own domain, their own market share, and they were on the campaign trail. It was sink or swim--no going back now.

For a while things went smoothly. The senator was almost too good to be true--a man of honesty and principles, which George appreciated, and the security team was friendly and not averse to letting journalists look under rocks for dead things, which Shaun appreciated. Senator Ryman’s popularity continued to grow, along with that of the newly minted “After the End Times.”

Then came Eakly, Oklahoma.

An outbreak of zombies attacked the camp they’d set up for the night after one of Senator Ryman’s speeches. Shaun and George helped to put down the outbreak (catching it all on film, of course), but not everyone survived. They lost staffers and security alike. It wasn’t until later that they discovered that the attack had been the result of deliberate sabotage. Some of the alarms had been cut, and some of the security guards had been shot. They never had a chance, and Shaun would have nightmares about it for weeks.

Still, the show (and the campaign) must go on, and they weren’t going to let a little thing like a failed assassination attempt slow them down. In fact, the footage from the attack actually made their ratings go up. Everyone loves a little drama with their news. Similarly, Senator Ryman’s popularity continued to increase, making him one of the top contenders for the party nomination as the RNC approached.

At which point tragedy struck again. Ryman took the nomination, over second place candidate Governor Tate (the dangerously fundamentalist candidate from Texas), while an outbreak was happening on his horse ranch back home. His wife’s parents, several stablehands, and his oldest daughter lost their lives while he was accepting his party’s nomination.

While most people wrote off the incident as a tragic accident, George thought there was something more there. She and Shaun went to investigate the site, bringing along Rick, one of their newer hires, to help out, and stepped on the answer. Literally. While Shaun was pulling broken pieces of syringe out of the bottom of his boot, they discovered another intact syringe, filled with live-state virus. It wasn’t an accident. Someone had deliberately infected one of the horses with active Kellis-Amberlee virus in order to set off an outbreak. It was murder.

After a slightly harrowing encounter with the military while they tried to leave the site, in which Shaun was belligerent toward the men with the big guns who were threatening his sister, they returned to their hotel. There, Ryman and his new running mate, Governor Tate, tried to convince them to stop following the campaign and go home. It was too dangerous. People were dying. Shaun and Georgia disagreed (Shaun somewhat more loudly and with more profanity, but he’s never minded looking unprofessional so that George can look better by comparison). They had signed on to follow the entire campaign, and they were going to follow it to the end, no matter what. While Buffy wanted to take the out they were being offered, she was overruled. They continued, hurtling toward the next tragedy.

It struck when the finally hit the road again, and this time, it was far more personal. They were attacked on the road to Texas, and Buffy was bitten, giving her plenty of time to deliver some devastating news. She had turned traitor. She’d been feeding information about the campaign to someone who wanted to do them harm. She’d thought she was doing the right thing to save the world, until the incident at the Ryman ranch, at which point she’d realized that her actions were getting people killed, and stopped the flow of information. Which of course, only made her a liability that had needed to be disposed of. She gave them her passwords before she finished converting, and Georgia fired the shot that kept her from rising again.

And the hits kept on coming. It turned out that someone had reported their entire convoy as dead to the CDC, who answered Georgia’s call for help with blood tests and tranquilizers. Shaun was the first to wake in CDC isolation and hear the cool story about how they were all dead, and he spent the time waiting for George to join the land of the living by annoying CDC staff and mouthing off at every opportunity to mask his worry. Once again, the senator tried to get them to back down, but they were in far too deep now.

After bullying George into getting some rest, the two of them, along with Rick, got back to work. Using Buffy’s passwords, and the bugs she had placed all over the campaign, they heard Governor Tate implicate himself in their attacks. The conspiracy was bigger than they had expected, and had the potential to splash out onto everyone who was associated with After the End Times, so they did the only think they could think of. They fired their entire staff, and hired back only those who were willing to take on the risk of being a part of their team. And then they did what they’d been doing all along: they got back to work on the story that would very likely cost them their lives.

The break finally came when they stopped to campaign in Sacramento. They followed the money and found evidence that damned Tate, and potentially implicated the CDC as well--not very comforting when you considered how much sway the CDC held. They approached Senator Ryman with the information. He wasn’t pleased. Not by their distraction over the past several weeks, and not by the implication that his running mate was involved in the terrorist act that had claimed his daughter. He threw them out.

And then things exploded. The trailers they and Rick had been staying in blew up, and as they were running to their van for safety, George was hit by a syringe containing live-state Kellis-Amberlee. It was the end of Shaun’s world. Maybe it was stupid for a guy to admit that his sister was his whole world, but it was the truth. He was never supposed to outlive George; never supposed to have to be the one who put a bullet in her to keep her from rising, but that was exactly what happened. They managed to slow the infection for long enough for her to post one last blog entry with all of their findings, and then Shaun shot her before she could undergo conversion.

And then he went out to have a word with the man who killed her. The attack that had taken out their trailers had been the beginning of an outbreak at the convention center, but Shaun wasn’t going to let a little thing like a zombie horde keep him from settling with Tate. He’d made enough friends in Ryman’s security staff, that what should have been an impassable quarantine barrier proved only moderately challenging. Tate did the supervillain “this is my master plan, look how smart I am” before eventually taking himself out of the equation, but Shaun didn’t buy it. George was the best, and Tate just wasn’t smart enough to be behind things. There was more to the conspiracy, and he was going to find it, if it was the last thing he did. Which it probably would be.

Grief was not kind to Shaun. After the events of Sacramento, Shaun lost most of his taste for going out into the field, and he took a backseat as administrator at After the End Times. Apparently putting a bullet in your sister makes you a lot less interested in poking at dead things. Who knew. Now, while still nominally in charge of the site, he devoted most of his time to finding George’s killers. And he did it with George’s voice in his head. It wasn’t healthy, and he knew it, but if it meant that he didn’t have to live his life without her, he’d take it. What was life without a little functional insanity anyway? Good thing he fired his psychiatrist.

Sample Network Entry:

[video]

Soooooo. In a place this big, I can't imagine I'm the only hyperactive asshole with impulse control issues and an excess of energy. Anyone know a good place for parkour? Paintball? Abseiling? I never learned to skateboard, but I'm willing to give it a try, as long as there's plenty of bleach around to deal with the blood I'll definitely leave on the ground.

I'm bored. Someone help me out here.

Note: I will not be taking any horse suggestions. Not even robot horses. Hard pass.

Sample RP:

If someone had asked Shaun whether he'd ever consider gardening, he would have laughed them out of the room. Gardening? Seriously? Shaun hasn't been able to hold still since he was eight years old, and it's not a skill he's all that interested in learning. Plants are slow, and he is not a patient man.

Still.

There's something about the steady growth of plants that he finds oddly reassuring. You give them what they need. They grow. Sure, the details of that can be a little fussy and particular, and sometimes he wishes it were a little less gradual, but… Here he is. In the Greenhouse. Watering and weeding, and getting incredibly anal retentive about the PH of the soil.

[Too bad Mom and Dad never set you loose with a garden hoe. Might have changed our lives.]

"Probably not. I'd still have followed you into blogging."

[Maybe I'd have followed you into horticulture.]

"Bullshit. You've always been obsessed with the truth."

Shaun doesn't stop holding up his half of the conversation with the voice in his head if anyone comes in. Can't you see he's in the middle of something here?

Special Notes: SHAUN IS A BIG OLE CW. There is adopted sibling incest, violence, and suicidal ideation. Also exceptionally bad parenting, because the Mason parents genuinely suck!