The Inmate and Suzanne

The Inmate and Suzanne are a character in the Non-Canon battle The Fantastic Tournament: Champions Edition

Weapon/Abilities:
A little ol’ interdimensional Thompson submachine gun that prefers the moniker “Suzanne” in her current incarnation. Jack doesn’t quite remember how he came to run into Suzanne; in fact he doesn’t quite remember much of his life prior to acquiring her at all. Suzanne is bound to Jack in ways he can’t comprehend, not that it matters much to him - he’s happy to employ her many talents in pursuit of multiversal criminality, which is just the way she likes it.

Being an item of incomprehensible (at least by human definitions) power, the weapon gives Jack several visible benefits – and a couple he probably hasn’t figured out. It’s remarkably sentient, and has an instinctive directive to seek out suitable partners in the multiverse and bond with them. Once bound Suzanne (as she’ll be referred to henceforth) takes a shape familiar to her partner (in Jack’s case, an M1921 tommy gun). As to what she looks for within partners accounts are conflicting – a good deal of ruthlessness, resourcefulness and intelligence all factor in to some extent, but the trait that most agree on is a desire to get up to incredible criminal escapades – whether those be heists or genocides doesn’t seem to matter. Her personality also warps somewhat to fit that of her partners – a ruthless tyrant might receive a similarly homicidal (and quite masculine) sword, Jack ended up with the inanimate equivalent of a cutthroat flapper.

In return for their partnership Suzanne makes her partners timeless – or at least slows down the effect time has on their bodies enough that they are functionally immune to its ravages. This point is obviously moot if her partner is already immortal when bound to, but she also serves as a particularly lethal variant of whatever form she chooses upon bonding, and will break several universal constants in order to stay with her partner whenever she feels she is needed. In her current form she doesn’t need reloading and can fire a wide variety of ammunition, though she generally needs to pause to ‘catch her breath’ if fired continuously for extended periods of time. She can alleviate this and increase her own (and by proxy Jack’s) power by accessing power sources, though it generally takes at least a sun’s worth of energy to have any noticeable effect.

Suzanne additionally makes her partners generally hardier at all times, considering that most mortals otherwise have trouble living an interdimensional lifestyle. She also shares a general telepathic link with her partner, which is the only method of communication available to her short of shooting/carving/burning/whathaveyou letters into surfaces.

Of course, if a partner happens to perish while bound to her Suzanne has no qualms about abandoning them – they were obviously not suitable enough, so she (well, it) will drift through the multiverse seeking a more enterprising and hopefully more successful partner.

Description:
Jack Hastings looks much like you’d expect a quintessential mid-20s gangster to look – Caucasian, messy brown hair and matching eyes generally kept beneath a fedora, never without a matching suit and tie – and the violin case Suzanne relaxes in when she’s not needed. He’s of average height (some 5’10’’) and somewhat emaciated from his recent stay in the jailhouse – multiversal prisons aren’t known for their nourishing fare, and The Meritorious Trial hadn’t given him time to sleep, much less eat. In spite of that he’s in reasonably good health, mostly thanks to the endurance provided by his link with Suzanne.

He’s quite sane, though his sense of morality is shaky bordering on nonexistent and his pursuit of criminality (and the kick he gets out of it) comes close to outright hedonism. Nothing pleases Jack more than a properly executed heist, or a refreshing round of extortion and bootlegging. This mindset along with an unreasonable amount of perseverance (helped along by Suzanne’s presence both as a cheerleader and fellow plotter) are what made Jack one of the most successful partners Suzanne’s ever had – up to his unfortunate capture and imprisonment by The Arbiter. He’s at times far too headstrong, raising when he should be folding – which has caused him no end of trouble (including his inglorious arrest), particularly because Suzanne only cheers on that kind of instinctual recklessness he tries not to succumb to.

Suzanne is the splitting image of an M1921 Thompson submachine gun, with a few minor embellishments – the seemingly wooden stock of the weapon changes color depending on her mood and the grip has several esoteric markings that appear somewhere on all of her incarnations. When not spitting hot lead she reclines in an ornate (and beautifully crafted) violin case. She also weighs almost nothing to Jack, a convenient benefit of their partnership.

Suzanne’s personality changes from incarnation to incarnation as previously stated, but she generally shares an amiable or at least pragmatically like-minded relationship with her partners. The personality she’s gained while bound to Jack is at times enthusiastically bloodthirsty and quite rational at others – though she generally prefers the “fill ‘em with lead” style of negotiation; she is a weapon after all.

Backstory:
Jack finds trying to recollect his life before meeting Suzanne as if peering through bubbled glass – warped and fragmented, which is why he generally doesn’t bother with it. Not that he had much sentimentality in the first place, from the little he can remember.

The first moment Jack can recall clearly is when, dying from a multitude of gunshot wounds on a dirt road somewhere out in rural Wisconsin, he was ripped through space and time to land in some sort of dimensional speakeasy, a splendid violin case standing by the barstool he landed in. Finding himself in simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar territory Jack quickly wised up to the way things worked now that he had apparently gone off the deep end of the multiverse – helped by a series of (alternatively) near-death experiences and lectures from several self-interested patrons who recognized what he had become.

He then embarked upon what was if not one of the most notorious multiversal criminal careers certainly one of the most successful. At first just running guns and liquor into civilizations that had either never encountered them or banned them wholesale, he worked his way up to orchestrating the thefts of revered artifacts from the center of universal empires and extorting information from demigods. His final score was an attempt to steal a particularly vital communications device from a Grandmaster, which temporarily a crowning triumph – until it brought The Arbiter down on his head and got him shut into a Void Prison chaired by The Warden.

Prison life was a peculiarly familiar and unfamiliar situation for Jack, much like his entrance into the multiverse. He’d certainly done time before, but couldn’t quite recall what it had been like. Turned out that it was shit, not to mention incredibly boring. The Warden took perhaps a little too much pleasure in depriving his prisoners of any form of stimulation, even taking into account the fact that most within were locked up for crimes on a multiversal scale – unless they had just happened to really get on a Grandmaster’s nerves. Worst of all was his complete separation from Suzanne, who had been confiscated and restrained by The Arbiter during processing – it felt much like losing his arms, and he was so tired all the time.

When The Warden got the idea for a prisoner’s grand battle into his head he didn’t bother to contact The Arbiter or anyone knowledgeable on the matter, simply tossing his eight least favorite inmates into The Meritorious Trial along with their gear. In Jack’s case this included Suzanne, and while overcoming a demonic kraken-hound, ethereal assassin and celestial guitar salesman (to name a few) wasn’t easy for someone who had previously preferred to operate with a minimum of wet work Suzanne had relished the opportunity to really let loose. When Jack found himself face-to-face with The Warden after forcing his last opponent, a sentient sun-in-a-box, into the round’s hazard (a particularly thrilling black hole) holding Suzanne, the outcome was an almost foregone conclusion. The Warden wasn’t much of a Grandmaster – lulled into sloth by millennia of watching his prisoners (all safely restrained by the work of The Arbiter) – and while it required nearly all the energy Suzanne had stolen from their last opponent Jack managed to throw him into the void, ending the round and returning him to the prison in The Warden’s place.

He quickly initiated a prison break to distract The Arbiter from his impending escape, and had just managed to retrieve his suit, tie and fedora when he was whisked off to the Fantastic Tournament’s Champion round – The Warden having pre-registered the victor of his battle in it to serve as further punishment for whatever guilty scum would eventually emerge victorious.

Realizing what had happened while being processed for the Fantastic Tournament, he resolved to call himself The Inmate on all the forms provided, mostly to spite The Warden – having defeated the purported “Grandmaster” surely he deserved such a title as well.

Tournament Information:
The Meritorious Trial was (ill-) conceived by The Warden while in a funk over finding further ways to punish his prisoners – with the prison population containing some of the most dangerous criminals in the multiverse they simply refused to respond to regular deprivation or abuse. Ignoring the fact that many of them had power to rival his own when freed from the strictures set in place by The Arbiter around the prison, The Warden plucked the eight inmates he most detested out of Death Row and allowed them to serve their sentences to each other while he watched. This had the convenient side effect of actually enabling their executions, as The Warden didn’t have the ability (or, legally speaking, the jurisdiction) to do so back at the prison. As the rounds went on he grew less and less cautious about intervening in the name of “justice”, mostly to ensure that contestants he found more entertaining (or those he wanted to suffer more than others) survived to later, even more painful rounds. As for the champion of the tournament, he had planned for their reward to be an eternity of grand battles until they perished – much like a gladiator, but without the promise of parole. It was, in his mind, the perfect way to finally break one of the scum that blasphemed proper order.

He was so caught up in the ecstasy of Jack’s elimination of Solaris that he sauntered right up to the victor to gloat over how his triumph was only the beginning of an eter- before Jack tossed him into the vortex of the Black Hole, ripping The Warden to shreds and ridding The Arbiter of a rather incompetent underling.