Gordon Lloyd Flashpan

Flashpan, approx. 5 years after the Irish Revolution

**Gordon Lloyd "Flashpan"** was a half-Irish privateer-turned-hero of the Irish Revolution. He was accompanied throughout his exploits by his loyal friend and bodyguard "Daft" Smitty the orc, who repeatedly suffered severe cognitive damage taking bullets and blows for Flashpan. Flashpan also founded a small family, adopting an Irish war-orphan named Allie to raise as his own daughter. Despite Flashpan's protests, she would follow her adoptive father into a life of swashbuckling adventure.

## Personality

In combat, Flashpan was fond of absurd maneuvers against overwhelming odds, leaping across barricades with carousel gun blazing, calling out to subordinates that were not there in an attempt to convince the enemy he had them outflanked, with the massive armored Smitty panting as he sprinted behind him, trying to shield Flashpan from the inevitable reply of the enemy. This tactic worked on more than one occasion, but most spectacularly when Flashpan more or less single-handedly routed a company of Bluejays, allowing other rebel forces to cover the evacuation of the raiders of the Dublin Armors Company.

Flashpan's troubled upbringing and extreme hostility to his father (and later, his father's wives), led him to develop an extremely fraught relationship with intimacy. Flashpan's sexual encounters occurred entirely before adulthood, and Flashpan the man reacted with suspicion or disgust to any who professed an attraction to him (including one especially persistent prostitute/secret agent who settled for Smitty). Publicly, he claimed to be "married to the Rebellion" and, later, to the Republic, and remained celibate his entire adult life.

## History

### Early Life

Flashpan was the son of The Professor (legendary arms dealer and con-man) and Molly, though he reviled and rejected his father's libertine lifestyle. Flashpan left the family planetary estate after the Professor, Molly and Patsy faked their deaths at the hands of the Knights Mercantile, setting young Gordon Lloyd on a path of vengeance that consumed much of his early life and led, among other regrettable incidents, to him gunning down KM Agent T. Cakes in the course of the Dublin Arms Company raid. When Flashpan learned that Professor Hill and his wives were alive and well, he renounced any and all connection to them, in utter disgust at their abandonment of him and his many siblings and half-siblings. He also abandoned his quest to pursue any relationship with his mother's family, the O'Callaghans, other than incidentally through his smuggling friend Tom O'Leery.

Of Flashpan's full siblings, half had died adventuring. Flashpan's only remaining connection to the Hill Clan was his half-sister Katya Morovin, with whom he remained fairly close throughout his life. Flashpan also knew and was friendly with Royce Poindexter, Professor Hill's oblivious associate and one of Aeldrum's leading industrialists. The two may have developed a friendship from their common experiences with sexually extravagant fathers and premature, traumatizing exposure to orgiastic behavior.

### The Irish War of Independence

*Main article: The Irish Campaign*
Flashpan served as a Captain in Col. Leo Cronin's Irish Borderers, leading raids on an RIC outpost (rescuing several smugglers who would play a key role in later engagements) and an RIC airfield (capturing several planes as the genesis of the revolutionary air force), establishing contact between the Borders and the urban CLAIN movement, masterminding and leading the raid on the Dublin Arms Company, forming and supplying the rebellion's first air-borne infantry company, leading the raid against Governor Sabina Rothclaw's airship, in the course of which the governor was slain, and leading his company into Dublin to attend the Irish Constitutional Convention as a signatory. Flashpan also saw action against the Genoese auxiliaries of the Aeldrum occupational forces, assisting his comrade in arms Eamon O'Finnegan in his vendetta against the Genoese Mafia.

Throughout the war, Flashpan developed a semi-legendary and grossly exaggerated persona for himself, becoming as much a propaganda symbol of the revolution as an active participant. He traded on acts of insane, tactically dubious heroism to bolster his reputation and, in the latter days of the war, took to having a film crew on hand to film his exploits. Despite this combination of narcissism and utterly reckless courage, or perhaps because it played into his hero fantasy, Flashpan was also a significant advocate in deed and word of "fighting a clean fight," often treating captured enemy officers to cigars and brandy and going out of his way to spare enemy combatants (though not above killing in cold blood anyone he considered a spy or otherwise "a dirty fighter"). On at least one occasion, this charitable conduct led his enemies to spare him in turn.

### Post-Revolution

After the revolution, Flashpan became a prominent member of the Irish Parliament, leading the Reconciliation and Reconstruction Party, which spoke against harsh reprisals for elves and former members of the Irish government and emphasized policies to reintegrate members of the RIC and other security forces into Ireland's battered economy, especially its hinterlands. In this role, Flashpan often served as an intermediary between the Irish Pale and the borderlands of Ireland, having fought alongside revolutionaries from both regions and made a point of integrating the two under his command.

Flashpan led the first delegation of the Irish government to Aeldrum and served as Ireland's first ambassador to Aeldrum after the young Republic received diplomatic recognition from its erstwhile overlords. Flashpan's companion, "Daft" Smitty, had developed a degenerative neural condition as a result of intense overuse of psychoactive cave crystals, and joined Flashpan on one last great adventure as the two made a diplomatic tour of the cosmos on behalf of Ireland. Smitty, after entering into a comfortable countryside retirement on a lovely farm upstate with many dogs, was replaced as Flashpan's bodyguard by Sergeant Aed Dillon, one of the smugglers that Flashpan and co. had liberated from the RIC outpost and who had since become Flashpan's second-most-trusted companion.

## Notes

1. ↑ On behalf of a monarchy that did not exist