Methuselah Locke

Methuselah Locke in 2022

**Methuselah Locke**, also known as **Dante Dupree**, is considered to be the antithesis of Ralph Rager. While Ralph is usually a calm and collected individual despite having a lot of anger from years of injustice, Methuselah is much more akin to Ralph sister Jordyn Rager: a reckless, impulsive individual who needs to be reigned in quite often. However, Methuselah's rage is understandable; ever since he had been in Operation Treadstone and its successor, Operation Reaper, Methuselah has had years of pent-up rage built within him, further fueled by the sheer amount of violence he'd been exposed to. It was due to this exposure to violence that led him to believe that violence is humanity's default state and that any moral revulsion humans feel towards committing violence is due to not wanting to appear barbaric like the animals.

## Biography

### Early life

Not much is known about Methuselah's early life. What is known is that he was named after Methuselah, the oldest living individual recorded in the Christian Bible and that when he was ten years old, he was discovered to have congenital insensitivity to pain during a paintball match, during which he discovered he was incapable of feeling the impact of the paintballs against his skin. At first, he thought it was a joke, but he soon found out the condition was real when he attempted to experiment with a hornet later that same day, which he intentionally provoked into attacking him. Sure enough, he felt no pain at all. The revelation initially fascinated him, but it caused worry amongst his family and friends. As he got older, Methuselah himself became concerned and by his pre-teen years, he expressed his concern that he had become a psychopath due to being incapable of feeling pain, despite being assured by his friends and family that his physical condition had no bearing on his mental and emotional abilities.

It's also known that he was born with an unusually high IQ, the origin of which remains a mystery. This allowed him to skip a grade and graduate high school early. During his short stint in high school, Methuselah became close with Ralph Rager, a fellow student with whom he bonded over their shared love of first person shooter games.

### Operation Treadstone

In August of 2016, he began to ponder a career in the CIA immediately after graduating high school after learning that a close friend of his was killed by ISIS in Syria. Enraged by both the injustice and randomness of his loss, Methuselah became consumed by an obsessive desire for retribution against the terrorists responsible.

This led him to join the Central Intelligence Agency, a decision that both stunned and horrified his family, who believed he had gone insane. Because he was only seventeen at the time, Methuselah didn't go through standard training at The Farm, AKA Camp Peary, Virginia. Instead, Instead, for a year straight he was shuttled from one location to the next, with the duration of time spent ranging from a week to a month.

There, he was trained in firearms and marksmanship, hand-to-hand combat, and explosives.

Around 2017, Methuselah's life changed forever when he was abruptly transferred to Operation Treadstone, a notorious super-human-soldier-assassin program that sought to create "perfect human weapons" via brainwashing and mind control. As a Treadstone agent, Methuselah became well known for his ruthlessness, his disregard for orders, and his disturbing success rate on missions, much like the infamous ex-Treadstone agent turned amnesiac Jason Bourne.

### Operation Reaper

After spending about six years in Treadstone, Methuselah's life was upended once again when he was transferred from Treadstone to Operation Reaper, considered a more "sadistic" counterpart to Treadstone. As part of his training, Methuselah was forced to view incredibly violent scenes from movies and TV shows meant to provoke anger, as part of a mind control technique serving to "channel his rage into his field work", essentially becoming a 21st century counterpart to ancient Norse Viking "berserkers" in the field.

As part of a highly-secretive "Retaliation Team," or "RET Team", Methuselah conducted highly illegal operations, which sometimes targeted American citizens and/or allies to the United States of America.

### Killing "Coyote"

One of the most notorious missions Methuselah ever ran was the manhunt for an elusive terrorist known only as "Coyote", who was later found to be leading a Middle Eastern terrorist organization known as *Qabdat Allah* (Eng: Fist of Allah). Methuselah, operating under the operational alias "*Dante Dupree*", ran sabotage and assassination operations against Qabdat Allah, killing various lieutenants within the organization and crippling his means of producing weapons of terrorism.

Everything came to a head when Coyote kidnapped Miriam Locke, Methuselah's mother, in an attempt to draw the man out of hiding, lure him into a trap and publicly execute both of them. The trap failed, however, when Methuselah, outwitting Coyote, infiltrated his underground bunker hideout, killed him and saved his mother.

### Going rogue

Years later, Operation Treadstone and its sister Beta programs, including Operation Reaper, were abruptly exposed to the international community, forcing everyone in the Beta programs to erase any and all traces of the Beta Programs' existence, which included killing their own operatives. Methuselah, who was enjoying a relaxing vacation at the time, was forced to go on the run after narrowly escaping a hit team sent to assassinate him.

In a desperate bid to save his life, Methuselah went off the grid after faking his death, before suddenly reappearing in Istanbul, Turkey, where he had an unexpected reunion with his old friend Ralph Rager. After learning that someone had publicly accused Ralph Rager of treason after publishing a news article falsely claiming he'd sold US national security secrets to the Turkish, Methuselah vowed to clear his friend's name by any means necessary.

## Personal details

### Physical appearance

Methuselah is a twenty-something year old man born with brown hair, though he dyed it blonde as part of his Treadstone and Reaper cover, along with blue-green eyes. He stands at about 5'11" and weighs about 190 pounds.

### Habits and beliefs

Methuselah's experience within Treadstone and Reaper have warped his overall outlook on the world. He has come to believe that humanity's natural state is a state of uncontrollable craving for violence and that any moral revulsion one feels is really a smokescreen to prevent them from becoming "like the animals."