Saint Scofflaw

Saint Scofflaw is a character in The Grand Battle Season 3.

Weapons/Abilities
Saint Scofflaw is a textbook evil genius. You can basically check off all the boxes on the form: In the pros column, manipulative charismatic scientific genius surprisingly spry dabbling in the occult natural leader; in the cons column, unfortunately loquacious petty revenge-driven short-sighted impatient sociopathic quirky likes to wear costumes. All of his technology runs on PSEUDOS, the Principle of Scientific Extravagance through Unproven Devices that Operate Somehow. PSEUDOS is a concept that only Scofflaw seems to be able to wrap his head around, and allows him to hack together something revolutionary or dangerous from spare parts in a matter of minutes. Currently he has on him a concealed ornate dagger that further conceals a number of PSEUDOS-scientific secondary functions; anybody who knows him well would be wise to suspect that lasers are involved somehow. It would be unsurprising if he had more than that up his sleeve, but it’ll serve him well to get out of a few scrapes until it inevitably breaks and he has to replace it with something similarly silly.

Description
Scoffles tends to reinvent himself every few major defeats, although the only alias that seemed to stick to him was “Saint Scofflaw” from his days leading the Crime Clergy. Currently he is going for sort of a Victorian-era villain look, an identity he’d wanted to refer to as “Baron Wasteland” until he learned, to his great disappointment, that that was already the name of a villain from Where in Time is Carmen San Diego. He’s rocking a cape, "trousers," and a puffy shirt, both in a color uncomfortably wedged between grey and green. Somewhat awkward as this getup is, it’s great for concealing weapons and in his over-the-hill years Scofflaw has become a bit too self-conscious for the skintight look, so the Abominable Aristocrat look suits him a bit better than, say, Scofflaw the Mime of Crime, or Strongman Scofflaw. (Note: he has chosen to eschew the monocle, because his vision is just fine and it’s stupid.)

More generically, Scofflaw is a short man at about 5’4,” and the line between what is muscle and fat on his body is blurred enough that you might be inclined to use the term “stocky” to describe him. His hair, depending on what angle you look at it from, is always either thinning or graying, but never both. His face is unusually expressive in what might be an endearing way, depending on who’s observing. He takes good care of his fingernails, always. Personality-wise, this varies as much as the rest, since the Pernicious Pope exhibits the sort of casual bipolarity one might expect from someone who has spent the better part of thirty years playing the world domination game. He is fond of wordplay, has never been observed listening to music, lies even when he’s telling the absolute truth, has no strong religious convictions one way or another, and is distrustful of every form of transportation quicker than a light jog and slower than teleportation. Synthesizing a general impression of the man from these unhelpful details, he is a bastard.

Biography
Saint Scofflaw claimed to have been born with a very peculiar form of synaesthesia that caused him to hear the law as music. His life, or so he says, though this seems very unlikely, is a constant battle to drown out the oppressively Top 40 grating autotune hackjob that is civilization. This is his excuse for turning to a life of crime from an early (probably single-digit) age.

In his youth, seeking a viable alternative to “pop” society, Scofflaw (obviously he wasn’t calling himself that yet; his real name was some bullshit or whatever who cares) experimented with more classical and ambient forms, studying the laws that dictate the universe, the Beyond, the human brain, and Mac OS X. Through what he considered to be leisurely headbanging along to some tunes that “actually come together” as he put it to some henchmen one uncomfortable evening, the lad found himself becoming a genius. So that would help, later.

Like all hipsters, Sir Scoffsalot eventually began to work with the delusion that his good taste was a sign of genuine latent talent talent latent, and thus he started to experiment with his own compositions: he had ideas for “like democracy but self-aware” and “socialist anarchy with a feudal twist.” These are new world orders that you probably haven’t heard of, no big deal. Unfortunately, Scofflaw found himself without the means to get his laws out there on a large scale, so he resolved to get big by, you know, conquering the world.

Enemies of Scofflaw (and there were many, though he tends to outlive them) have claimed that this purported synaesthesia works both ways: that when music is playing, the villain cannot hear it but simply perceives a set of codified guidelines for how to behave, and is compelled to obey. Like the entirety of this biography, this is probably bullshit, although some smartass scholars have noted that this is not dissimilar to the effect that music has on most teenagers.