Brigadier Richter D1

P E R S O N A L I T Y :

There may have been a time in my life when I was happy, and laughed, and relaxed, but that time has been gone for longer than I can remember. ‘Happy’ is an unknown concept to me. You need to be happy to laugh. And relaxation? Ha, please. Shit needs to get done; I don’t have time to ‘unwind’ or whatever the kids are calling it these days. Don’t get me wrong, I ain’t complaining. Far from it. I’m just stating the facts. This is all I’ve known; hard work and no play, and all the stress that accompanies it. I have to work hard to keep the business afloat. Taxidermy isn’t exactly a lucrative business. The bills need to get paid, or Lou will end up under the same roof as that man. And I will start whoring myself out, before I let that happen.

There are very few people in my life, and out of all of them I only love two, my brother, Lou, and my mother. The rest can go fuck themselves. Between the two of them, I can only trust my brother. My mom is still connected to my father, and we all know that he is Satan and disguise, so I have trouble trusting her with any details of my life, for fear that my father will twist her arm into divulging my secrets. Not that I have anything that important to tell, it’s just the principle of the matter: I don’t what my father knowing anything about me or Lou.

Apart from Lou, I am alone. It’s not a fun feeling, loneliness. I try to soothe the worst of it with my work. The muttations I create with assorted animal parts makes me feel less empty inside, sad to say. I take the weirdness factor up a notch by giving them names, and histories. It’s an obsession, in fact. But hey, it helps with the loneliness.

It’s not that I haven’t tried talking to other people besides my brother… It’s just that people think I kill their pets and preform freaky experiments on them; it’s a rumor that was started by some skanky girl at school a few years ago. You know how kids are, they are afraid of anyone different, and boy am I different. I mean. I run a taxidermy shop. It’s to be expected. The worst of the rumors and, I’ll admit it, bullying stopped now that we are older. I could have put an end to it sooner, but I wasn’t all that bothered by what the others said or did to me. I did, however, choose to beat the crap out of anyone who said a word against my brother. You’d think that they’d stop messing with both of us, but I think they realized that I wouldn’t stop them unless it was against Lou, so I took the bullying for the both of us. I’d do anything for Lou. I’m his senior by only nine months, but he is still my little brother and it’s my job as the eldest to watch out for him.

I’m an introvert, if you haven’t guessed by now. I’m not good with dealing with others. I can come of abrasive, or insensitive, or even too sensitive or just plain weird. Whatever the situation, I find some way to screw it up. One thing you can count on though is my dry sense of humor. I’m sarcastic most of the time, to the point where even Lou is unsure if I’m being serious or not. And don’t worry, I’m self-deprecating too, so I can do the bullying for you.

H I S T O R Y:

Growing up with a man who hates children is as horrible as you’d expect it to be, and more. My brother and I were not allowed to do anything fun, and if we did, we’d somehow get punished for it. We had no toys, we had no friends, and we didn’t go on any trips to the park. But being boys and being so close in age, Lou and I would find ways to have fun without any of those things, and we could get very rowdy from time to time. Or we did… until we didn’t anymore. We must have been around five when father decided one day that he no longer wanted to hear our joyous laughter. We were running through the house when he caught us and basically screamed at us for having too much fun and being too loud. After that day, if we made one peep while father was in the house, our asses would be black and blue for days, so we learned real quickly to just sit in our rooms in silence.

Our mother, sad to say, was weak. She was loving, but she never stood up for us. She was too afraid of her husband. She always gave us cookies when dad locked us in our room, and snuck us toys when he was out doing who knows what. But she didn’t stop the beatings, or the screaming fits, or the unusual punishments like being locked in the closet. She sat by and watched it all, crying silently.

When we didn’t give him an excuse to be cruel to us, father would make one up. If there was anything out of place, or missing in the house we were the ones to get punished. I started smart talking him and throwing tantrums so he’d take out his aggression on me, and not Lou. It worked most of the time. I got more beatings than Lou did in the younger years, but as we grew older I was unable to draw my father’s attention away from him. Lou was just getting more and more feminine as the years went on, and although father hated our guts, he wanted us to represent him and be manly men like him. He’d beat and beat poor Lou whenever he’d see him messing with flowers. It got to the point where Lou had to go to the hospital because of his injuries.

The only escape we got was at career training. There we were finally able to loosen up. I gave everything to training, it was all I had at that point in my life. I was actually pretty good. I'm a lanky guy, but that just translates to speed on the mat. I was only in training for a few years, though. Some rather unfortunate events pulled me out of it.

We the training, I became more confident. One day when father had Lou in the corner and was throwing punch after punch after punch, I got up the nerve to kick him in the ass. Dad had turned around so fast; I didn’t even have time to draw breath before his fist was connecting with my jaw. He pinned me to the ground and wailed on me just as he had been doing to Lou moments before. He got up, and kicked me a few times in the ribs, and left us. Mother came in, cried over us, took us to the hospital, and had our grandpa come take us to live with him. We were both fifteen at the time.

I don’t know why mom never took us to live with grandpa sooner. Maybe she was hoping that her sadistic husband would stop abusing his children. Whatever the reason, I never really forgave her. Living with grandpa was great. He was smart, and energetic, and taught us everything our father didn’t. He even let us work in his shop.

I come from a long line of entrepreneurs. The Richters have had carts that sold food and knickknacks in the town square, shops that sold hats and dresses and furniture, a small training center for careers, a group home for the geriatric, and for a while we headed a factory that made parts for toilets: we’ve pretty much dabbled in everything. Most recently, we’ve been in the taxidermy business. Grandpa started it when he was just a kid with his father. He taught us the trade when we went to live with him. Dear old dad was too lazy and unambitious to work at the shop, and had never even bothered to tell us about it. He was perfectly content to sit in the family house and blow through the wealth the family had accumulated over the years.

After two years of relative peace, grandpa died. It was sudden and unexpected, so he had never gotten a chance to change his will to include his two grandkids. Everything went to father, including the shop. Father was spiteful enough that he was going to sell it off, just to hurt us. But he wasn’t spiteful enough to stop us from buying it off of him ourselves. It was nearly all the money we had saved, but we got the shop back. We just didn’t have enough to keep it operating.

The idea came to me at my grandpa’s funeral, as I recalled his expensive amethyst ring which he was being buried with. It would be simple to come back later, dig up the loosened soil, and retrieve it. And even simpler to pawn it off. Grandpa would not have cared. It was to keep the business afloat. His business. And why stop at there? There were hundreds of other graves surrounding him, with scores of other jewelry and expensive items waiting to be dug up again.

And just like that, we had the money to run our shop.

A P P E A R A N C E:

I am not sure if a woman would consider me handsome or not. I haven’t exactly talked to them enough to know what they look for in a guy. If I were to guess, I’d say I was too stocky, too shaggy, to be considered handsome. I’m 5’9”but I only weigh about 160 pounds. I’m a bean pole. Who is attracted to bean poles? On top of that, I’m pale. Like, ghost pale. I spend all my time indoors. The only time I spend a significant amount of time outside is at night.

I would probably be more attractive if I would actually groom myself, but I don’t care much about personal grooming. I shower of course, and brush my teeth, but that’s pretty much it. My hair is kept long, and I rarely shave, leaving me with a quasi-beard half the time. I have thick, wavy brown hair – which sometimes looks black – that sticks up every which way. The only thing I do to maintain it, is to run my fingers through it when I get up in the morning, and when I get frustrated. My eyes are an ambiguous shade of some light color. Mostly, they look brown but in other lights in angles the color changes.