âšSeth Rollins. cis male. he/they. 37.â© We just saw Ansel Briar entering LâAntique Câest Chic. I heard through the grapevine that their loyalties lie with the Jolly Rogers and that they also go by the King of Hearts. Be careful, they work for them as an assassin and can sometimes be bored by repetition, jealous, petty, or even bloodthirsty but Iâve also heard some people say that they were dedicated, confident and quite stylish.â Moss. they/them. 23. EST. violence against children (< 10)
AESTHETIC | MUSIC | LONDON FALLING RPG
STATS
Real name: Ansel Ford Briar
Code name: King of Hearts
Alliance: Jolly Rogers
Job: Contract Assassin. (Works part time coaching at Crossfit North London, esp in conditioning. Bit of a reputation for being intense, but thatâs the point, right?)
Age: 37
Physical: 6'1", 225 lbs
Birthplace: Houlton, Maine, US
DOB: August 10, 1986
Star sign: Leo
Gender: Male-adjacent (he/they)Â
Sexuality: Bisexual disaster
FC: Seth Rollins
Family: Dan Briar (Father), Evelyn Summers-Briar (Mother), Four Siblings (I'll name 'em someday), Rebecca Briar (formerly Ballagh, Ex-Wife)
BIOGRAPHY
Anselâs from the sticks. His father was a hunter first and owner of the local general store second, born and raised in the woods of northern Maine, where his mother settled there later with a group of poets and artists who were inspired by the quiet snowy mountains and the way the sun shines through the leaves. Those same mountains meant she had to be driven nearly two hours in the familyâs beater red pickup to the nearest hospital to bring him and his younger siblings into the world. All of them were hard on her, but that didnât stop them from having five kids.Â
His mother called him Ansel, after Ansel Adams. His dad said that was some pretentious bullshit and always called him Andy, or the leader of the pack, so Ansel did his best to step up and be the best role model he could. He started following his father out hunting when he was five, and maybe they shouldâve started worrying when he took to it so quickly. Maybe Ansel had a couple too many questions about how to balance wearing camo to blend in with bright, flashy hunter oranges and yellows, but was happy enough to sit still and quiet, listening for a broken twig or rustling leaves, and he never cried when his dad showed how theyâd have to slit a buckâs throat to kill it quickly if the first shot didnât get it done. Ansel killed his first deer at 8 without his dad holding the rifle steady, skinned it a little too quickly and held onto the antlers as a trophy as long as he could.
Ansel went to a university in Boston, and both reveled in finally being a small fish in a much bigger pond, and itched for attention. He studied literature to keep his mother happy, spent hours hitting the gym to look more impressive than he was and make up for the lack of mountains to climb, and made the rounds through anyone looking for a messy one-night stand.Â
But then met Rebecca Ballagh in some 300 level poetry class he suddenly had to pretend he cared about. She was something special, had enough of a dangerous edge that Ansel couldnât get bored of her if he tried. He met her family at a shooting range outside the city after dating for about a year, and they offered to put him up and give him a job if he wanted to stay in Boston. It took him a little too long to realize her family were the last, quiet dregs of the Winter Hill Gang and US-based IRA that were slowly building themselves back up, but hey, the one thing heâd missed about home was hunting.Â
A person ainât too different from a deer, to a wolf. Everything bleeds the same.
But now that he ran with a pack again, it came with new rules. Clean up, cut your hair, kid. Pipe down. Dress like everyone else. Wear black. Shut the fuck up and become a ghost. Becca helped when she could, but she liked him better this way too. Colder, a soldier. They got married in 1998, and Ansel didnât quite look like himself in the pictures.
He tried as hard as he could to just focus on blending in- you donât wear camo without orange, youâll get shot- but the longer he stayed, the whole gang made his skin crawl. Every hit was scripted down to the second, and if he deviated from it in the moment to keep himself alive and useful he got beat down and hung out to dry in front of the rest of the gang. He started spending more time at their local crossfit box than with his wife. At least something was intensive enough to make him feel something. But even that after a while started to feel monotonous. The same fights with the family. The same rotation of classes and workouts and late night jobs. The same accusations that he was having an affair with his trainer. Always the fucking same. Boredom sunk its claws into him, but breaking routine only shortened his leash.Â
They slowly fell apart over seven years, until Becca served him their divorce papers in 2004. Maybe he bitterly sent an anonymous tip to the local PD about the plans for the familyâs next few moves the day before they had to appear in court. Served them right, Ansel thought. At least until cops had barricaded the entrance to his new studio apartment he just finished moving into a week later, saying that theyâd been given anonymous information that warranted arrest and trial.
He didnât know who else to call except one of the gangâs lawyers, who came in all smug smiles and talked him through exactly what had been given to the cops like heâd written up the list. With the given evidence, he would have done life in prison and paid thousands of dollars in fines on top of legal fees. But by already coming back to them? The gang could put in some work, get it down to a lot of hearsay and a manslaughter charge on one of the hits that Ansel had really fucked up. The angle was clear, and the gang were convinced that by getting it down to ONLY 15 years in a State Prison, heâd have to come crawling back to them on his knees. He walked free in 2019, finally sick of sick of sewing orange and camo, but with enough scattered online classes for a quasi fashion degree and a developed enough collection that he could apply and get his visa to work a brutal, grunt seamstress job at Burberry, and get the fuck away from Boston before he could even be approached by his former pack.
Being American and an ex-convict did him very little favors and that job was falling through before he knew it, but he had found a couple crossfit boxes along the way, and did his best to fight off the bone-deep itch to draw blood other than pricking his own fingers, and take sharpened fabric scissors to someoneâs flesh. The wolf was almost free of his chains, screaming to be fed so he could be truly free and then suddenly heâd killed his landlord after Burberry fired him and Ansel couldnât quite scratch together rent. A vague shape of a heart carved into the side of his neck with a kitchen knife just so he could watch it bleed. Instinct took over, and he covered his ass, watched the press run wild, and was quickly approached by a different sort of pack. Not a family, like Winter hill, but a crew. The Jolly Rodgers.
