Ragdoll

Ragdoll (Scenesys ID: 9362)
Quote
Profile
Full Name:	Peter Merkel Jr.
Gender:	Other
Species:	Metahuman
Theme:	DC (VFC)
Occupation:	Freak
Citizenship:	American
Residence:	Gotham
Education:	Home-Schooled
Status:	Dropped
Groups:	Suicide Squad
Other Information
Apparent Age:	28	Actual Age:	28
Date of Birth	30 December 1999	Actor:	Bill Skarsgard
Height:	185 cm (6'1")	Weight:	72 kg (158 lb)
Hair Color:	Bald	Eye Color:	Blue
Theme Song:	"Doll Parts" by Hole

Profile

Peter Merkel Jr. is the second Ragdoll, a mantle he inherited from his cult-leader father. Ragdoll has subjected himself to countless surgeries and physical operations, replacing his joints and sinews, retraining his muscles, mutilating himself in the pursuit of a perverted perfection that only he can imagine. Transformed, hyperflexible, disturbing and quite, quite mad, he serves terror to those who cross his path, good or evil, while trying to find a place to belong.

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Description

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Description:

The Ragdoll can be a horrifying figure, even to those familiar with it. The face has been hidden behind a bland and expressionless mask strapped over the face, slits for eyes and a mouth, vacant and eerie and white as bone. Thick red yarn serves for a wig, draping long over shoulders, like dreadlocks but thicker and more obviously artificial. They hang down to the small of Ragdoll's back. Ragdoll's voice has a sing-song, unpleasant quality, filled with whispers and cracks, insidious. The eyes behind the mask are quite mad indeed, bloodshot amber-flecked and green.

Ragdoll wears a close-cinched costume with a tatterdemalion theme. The color is primarily white, but there are checkerboard elements along the shoulders and waist, along with splashes of here and there. Some of them might be blood, but probably not. Probably. Their body is thin and wiry, all jutting angles and sharp elbows. Posture tends to vary into the eccentric, Ragdoll's seemingly infinite flexibility leading them to keep an almost spider-like position, legs and arms criss-crossing and draped across one another, head turned in odd directions, hands reversed. That sort of thing. It can be quite disconcerting to anyone unused to Ragdoll's presence and more than terrifying to those they oppose.

History

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History:

Peter Merkel Jr. never really had a chance. He got his name from his father, a homicidal madman and cult messiah who called himself Ragdoll. His father was a master of the art of contortion, a psychotic with a gift for the tantric who wooed other people under the sway of his charisma. He was a powerful, fearsome and highly abusive individual. His son and namesake disappointed him for not inheriting his gift for contortion. He was ordinary, normal, just a boy. Not a worthy heir. Peter barely survived his childhood and never overcame the disgust in his father's eyes.

By the time he was a teenager, he tried to rectify his ordinary nature. He used connections through his father's cult, travelling to third world countries and underground clinics. He had himself altered, transformed. His body reshaped in the image of Ragdoll, pushing even beyond his father's capabilities with the help of science and cybernetics. He became obsessed with body modification, sometimes mutilating himself when he'd gone too long without a surgery. He even tried to do a few surgeries on himself.

Peter's mind hung by a thread already when his father died. The cult scattered and Peter found himself putting on the garment of the Ragdoll. At first, he followed his father's footsteps, cutting a path of mayhem and thievery and murder. But he didn't have his father's charisma - or his hatred. He began to wonder if there might be something else for him to do. He'd made himself into a monster. Maybe that wasn't all he was, though. Maybe he could be something more. Maybe even something beautiful.

Probably not. But he could have fun trying.

Personality

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Personality:

Peter's internalized his father's hatred for him. He regards himself as a failure, redeemable only by his transformation into Ragdoll. As successful as that has been, his self-loathing has remained. He has very low self-esteem. He likes to be special and be treated like a freak and a monster. If he's not, if someone else is more strange or more off-putting, he will be very put out indeed, becoming jealous and resentful.

He doesn't particularly have anything resembling a morality. Good and evil to him are senseless abstracts. He can have empathy for other people and has displayed signs of compassion and concern for those whom he likes. But he can also witness or even conduct acts of sheer brutality that would curdle the blood of the sensitive-minded. He is moody and capricious, deeply insane and prone to whimsy. He cannot be trusted or relied upon in any consistent way.

He's quite clever and a bit devious, a trait he hides sometimes under seeming pathetic or foolish. While he didn't inherit his father's inherent gifts, Peter did draw from him a savage cunning that he puts to good use, whether for good or for ill at any given time.

Abilities

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Child of Pain:
Peter's entire life has been painful. He suffered a childhood of abuse, beatings and torments. As an adult, he has subjected himself to countless unnecessary surgeries and routinely mutilated his own body in a variety of transformative ways. His nervous system is, in some ways, a wreck, but it means that he is both in constant pain and has an almost endless tolerance for it. Injury will not debilitate him. Torture will not persuade him. In fact, very often, he enjoys pain, as an alternative to the numbness he normally experiences.

Hyperflexibility:

While not a naturally gifted contortionist like his father, Peter's determination to win approval led him to undergo extensive illegal black market surgies to simulate and even surprass his father's capabilities. His tendons and muscles have been reinforced with elastic materials. His joints have universally been turned into ball sockets, giving him complete mobility and universal motion. He can turn his hands, wrists or head around completely, swivel his waist in a corkscrew. He can hook a leg over the back of his neck or tie his arms into a knot behind his back. The (majority) of these actions can be done without pain and with full articulation and control. While his bones remain normal, breaking them isn't as common because his joints do not offer stiff resistance to impact and his body will fold around impacts rather than snap, giving him a better than average durability to physical attacks or falls.

Skills

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Acrobatics:
Ragdoll has trained extensively in acrobatics and tumbling, enhanced by his inhuman flexibility and muscle control. He learned from circus freaks and performers, giving him remarkable balance and agility. He can perform complex tumbling in the air, walk narrow tightropes and knows how to fall as safely as he can. He can be quite a whirling dervish in action, hard to track and constantly moving.

Contortion:
Utilizing his rotating joints and flexible sinews, Ragdoll can contort his body in extreme ways, enabling him to fit through small space, box himself up into constricting containers, hide in places you wouldn't expect a person to be. His internal organs will shift along with his body to accomodate his contortions, although he is limited by, say, his ribcage or his pelvis

Control:
For all his madness, Peter possesses incredible self-discipline and physical control. He can hold a posed position for hours at a time, ignoring cramping or fatigue. He can cut off a blow millimeters away from impact or pause in the midst of a wild tumble, his legs akimbo. His muscles move and react precisely on his conscious command - provided nothing goes wrong, which it sometimes does

Eerie:
Ragdoll is a disturbing individual. Even his allies often find him deeply unsettling. His infinite flexibility and strange appearance make him like something out of a horror movie. This can be quite a weapon, in its own right, as some opponents will recoil from him in sheer terror without even engaging the flexible freak in combat. He's quite intimidating in his own distinct way.

Stealth:
Ragdoll is insidious and sneaky. He's been creeping around where he didn't belong since he was knee-high. He clings to shadows, stays out of sight and can move in silence and darkness with an assured step.

The Clinch:

Ragdoll's method of combat is largely based in close quarters combat and grappling. Like an anaconda, he wraps himself around his prey, binding them with his strong limbs and his flexible joints. He knows how to squeeze people, how to break their bones, how to choke them unconscious and inflict pain. While he's about average as a hand-to-hand combatant in terms of striking, he's extremely dangerous in the clinch.

Resources

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Costume:
Ragdoll's costume is a tatterdemalion bodysuit, a creepy featureless mask and a moptop wig made of blood-red yarn. He carries a few gadgets in pockets - lockpicks, glasscutter, a bit of cord, that sort of thing. He doesn't wear kevlar as it might inhibit his flexibility with the padding. He carries several weapons hidden upon him, including a pair of sharp daggers, caltrops and, notably, a pair of gloves studded with shards of broken glass.

Cult:
Peter's father served as the leader and central figure of a radical cult. Anti-establishment and anti-authoritarian, they have scattered in the wake of the original Ragdoll's death. Nonetheless, they remain out there, hidden in the world, occasionally sympathetic to the son who has inherited his father's mantle. They will regard Peter with a mingling of awe, fear and resentment. Some might even hate him. Others will love him fanatically. All will fear him. Occasionally one comes across his path and proves useful.

Underworld:

Peter grew up the son of a supervillain, part of the criminal underground. He has connections, old friends and familiar faces. He knows fences, crime bosses, smugglers, assassins. That isn't always the same as trusting them - or them trusting him in return. Still, he has plenty of contacts at the very least who would hear him out and, possibly, help under the right circumstances. They also serve as a useful rolodex when he's feeling vigilante and yearning for something fun to chase.

Weaknesses

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Creep:
Even beyond his physicality, Ragdoll makes people uncomfortable. He has a strange cadence to his voice. He stands too close. He interrupts or giggles as strange times. He is, to put it frankly, out of his damn mind and he doesn't do a very good job of hiding it. Not that he's trying to do so. He's rather proud of his difference, flaunting it even. He likes making people squirm.

Freak:
Peter is bad at blending. He toys with his joints, often putting them off kilter or sitting in strange ways. When he goes without his mask, which isn't that often, his face is disfigured, odd, scarred, sometimes partially paralyzed if he's pinched a nerve during a contortion. His eyes bulge. He's gangly and off-putting and generally won't pass for normal outside of a crowd.

Physiology:
Ragdoll's body is full of all kinds of metal and plastics and artificial implants. Any X-ray or metal detector will immediately recognize him as an anomaly. While he's generally good at stealth, his joints will occasionally clatter or click, giving him away. Sometimes he'll cut off a nerve and an arm will go entirely numb. Sometimes he'll twist the wrong way and be paralyzed by pain through his spinal column. Sometimes his arm gets stuck out of joint and it takes him a long while to work it back into place. That sort of thing.

Self-Destructive:
Nobody hates Peter more than he hates himself. Maybe his father did, but Peter just internalized all that. He's constantly tried to rebuild himself into something better, something special, but he's never satisfied with the result. He's mutilated his own body in pursuit of a twisted ideal planted in his head by the madman who gave him life. Sometimes he hurts himself. Sometimes badly.

The Medicine:

Due to the unstable nature of some of his enhancements, Ragdoll has to take a patented black market medicine concocted specially for him. He takes it about once a day. Without it, his joints will begin to tear through his skin and fall apart. So he tries to avoid that.

Logs

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Title	Date	Scene Summary
Post Lesson Pick Me Up	February 6th, 2020	Kara and Nick will probably regret this motivational speech

Cutscenes

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Gallery

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