Chips

## Chips Swanson

* **Name:**Christopher "Chips" Arnold Michael Swanson
* **Position:**Acting General Manager of Buddy's Bomb Shelter  (official), lieutenant in the Underberg Crime Family.
* **Metatype:**Dwarf  (*Homo sapiens pumilionis*)
* **DOB:**1/4/2043, Duluth MN, UCAS
* **Education:**Duluth East High School, Class of '62, attended North Dakota Regional University 2062-2064 (Major: Mathematics)
* **Family:**Christian Swanson (father, Duluth MN), Pheobe [nee Hagan] Katsaros (mother, Edina MN), Andreas Katsaros (step-father, Edina MN), Lena [Whately] Swanson (step-mother, Duluth MN), Gabriel Swanson (half-brother, Duluth MN), Alexander Katsaros (half-brother, Edina MN)

Chips is a gangster almost despite himself. If you asked Chips, he's just a guy trying to have a good time, who now finds himself in a position of responsibility he never asked for.

Having grown up with a classic combination of material comfort and emotional distance, Chris was an irresponsible party kid wasting somebody else's money, sure that he could do exactly what he wanted. His inattention to schoolwork in school (carried through school largely through his father's money and his own native intelligence) meant that his grades weren't good enough to get him into a really good school, so he picked a really good party school and attended NDSU, ostensibly in Math (a subject that he picked because it came easy to him), but mostly majoring in drinking, picking up sorority girls and losing his dad's money betting on Bison games (the high possible return betting against the Bison were just too good to pass up), leading to his dad finally cutting him off at the end of Spring Semester 2064. Chris lived off his friends most of the summer and managed to get a part-time bartender gig at the Astroturf with the fall. With no prospects of any note, Chris saw no point in saving any of his money, spending it on booze and games of chance, convinced he was smart enough make his fortune this way. Of course he lost more than he won and supported himself by pawning  the expensive things he still had on him and cheating at gambling on the side.

The thing that kept this from being just another college drop-out story is that, this is the same year of the Red River Crisis of '64 , which started with a New Revolutuion -backed North Star uprising and ended with a Sioux  invasion and the creation of the Red River Disputed Military Zone. This chaos, combined with the Second Crash, was the opportunity the intelligent, but lazy, young man needed. With several important debts wiped out in the Crash, and chaos about who controlled what, he picked up a number of assets he could loan out or borrow against. By 2066 he was supported almost entirely by a tenuous web of interlocking scams and dubious business deals, each supporting the other, including hefty debts to Underberg loan sharks. The local gamblers came to rely on Chris to back them in gambles, giving him the nickname "Chips".

The breaking point came in early summer of '66, when he was planning on funding his ongoing debt payment and incurring through cheating a bunch of NDRU Bison players out of their scholarship overages in a card game. He probably would have gotten away with it if it hadn't coincided with one of the players, star Offensive Vanguard DuWayne Wahlo was caught in a career-ending injury and the game was canceled. Desperate for funds, he tried to con veteran Underberg man Sammy the Squat, at a Ohuyuhmunpi game run by Chips' future rival Popcorn. Catching the kid palming some bones on a roll he had big money he owed, Sammy's first instinct was to put him down hard as an example. Until he looked into it a little farther and discovered just how MUCH this kid owed the Tiospaye. Looking into the full scope of Chip's web of personal finances gave the Squat an idea. There was, he recognized, a lot of money to be made from all the irons this kid had in the fire. So he pulled the kid aside and offered him a deal. Basically: in return for keeping the Tiospaye from turning him in to dog food, Chips could run his scams, only now he'd run them for the Family.

Sammy gave him Family money to invest and the profits from Chips' scams and shady deals would go back to the Family to pay against Chips' debts (which Sammy had bought up). By the end of the sixties his initial debts had been paid off, but by that time he was so far enmeshed in the Family's business, there was no way out. He was running a fair bit of the gambling that ran out of Sammy's territories (including the incredibly profitable Buddy's Bomb Shelter, where he worked as night bartender and MC for the girls).

Strangely, it was getting involved in the mob that seemed to teach him responsibility. He just needed the right motivation. That motivation being, of course, a legitimate and petrifying fear of Sammy and Ma. His background in math made him a decent business manager and he rose through the 70's to become the day manager at Buddy's. He had been thinking, it was said, about his next moves, talking with Sammy about maybe detaching from the shadier bits of the business and setting up his own place.

However, the events of early August put an end to all that. With Sammy's death Chips now finds himself not only in de facto charge of the Bomb Shelter, but with Ma considering him a full Lieutenant in the family. Although he's been involved in the operation for years its only now that he's begun to think of himself as a gangster. Because Ma says so.

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