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Brad Crawford

Real Name: Arthur Hurley

Room: M6

Age: 27

Hair Color: Black

Eye Color: Gold

Height: 6'1"

Backstory

Brad Crawford was born into an average, upper-middle-class American family. At birth, there was nothing too different about the boy, aside from the strange gold hue of his eyes - but it was judged to be a shade of light brown, and simply left at that. He progressed faster than most children did intellectually and physically, and by the time he was five, they had introduced him into the first grade. From there, it quickly became apparent that he was gifted, but also somewhat antisocial, choosing to spend free time alone rather than with his classmates. This was attributed to his being younger than the others, and thus somewhat isolated; after that, they decided not to skip him a grade, even though he was clearly above the rest of his peers.

By the time he hit second grade, Brad had proved himself to be brilliant and analytical, even at such a young age. He was reading, writing, speaking, and able to do complex math at several grade levels above his own. Perhaps the only areas where he didn't show an extreme talent in were art, which seemed to elude him with its vagueness, and physical education, although that was mainly because of his small stature.

Unfortunately, his brilliance was passed over when he began to suffer from incredible migraines at age seven, which were accompanied by no small amount of screaming fits and seizures. Initially, he was diagnosed with epilepsy, but when medication and treatment did nothing for him, the investigations began to get deeper. When he wasn't unconscious or incoherent, Brad would blurt out predictions for the future, things he'd swear to have seen while lost in pain - and nearly every single time he did, the predictions came true. This happened too often to be put down to coincidence. His parents, unsure of what to do, took their son out of school and began to provide tutors for him, which made the incidents less public but no less frequent.

By the time he was nine, Brad's seizures hadn't decreased in the slightest, and his headaches were getting not only worse, but almost constant. Only extreme amounts of painkillers or sedatives could provide him with any sort of relief, and those were extremely difficult to procure, especially for a nine-year-old. There seemed to be no way to save the boy from a future of practically comatose state when Rosenkreuz, a very specialized and secretive school-slash-agency in Germany, arrived on the scene with an offer nobody could refuse: they would take, treat, and educate young Brad for a minimal fee. His parents agreed almost immediately and sent their son across the Atlantic ocean in the hopes that over there, they could take care of him.

Rosenkreuz had learned of Brad's accurate predictions, even through his excruciating pain, and determined that the boy was clearly a precognitive of no small ability. They began teaching him not only what he would get in a private academy but how to master the visions he had, complete with the pain. It could be kept at bay, they said, if he developed the ability to control the massive waves of possible futures and keep them just outside of his mind. He learned to construct fierce mental barriers and arm them with weapons, and once that had been done, he was taught how to determine which threads of the future would be the ones he needed. Let them come to you, he was told, but only let them in when you know they are the right ones. It was easier said than done, but Brad was an extremely bright young man, and by the time he hit sixteen he had nearly mastered his precognition.

At eighteen, with his own future centered around Rosenkreuz and his personality quickly becoming a harsh, bitter, manipulative one due to the ferocity of Rosenkreuz's training, Brad met up with the man who would be his future partner: a then-thirteen-year-old Schuldig known as Keane. In the following years, he and the boy became close accomplices, with Brad mentoring the young man and Keane developing at a rate even faster than Brad remembered doing on his own. Because of their closeness, the heads of Rosenkreuz partnered the two up for off-ground missions, eventually forming the two into the team later known at Schwarz. (The name didn't become official until after they had been granted Farfarello, a psychotic Irishman dragged from the institutions in his home country due to his incredible pain tolerance, and Nagi, a young Japanese telekinetic street rat that Brad himself had personally found on a visit to the country.)

Schwarz became somewhat infamous years later, after Brad had begun to be referred to by his last name and reached the painstaking (or so Keane-turned-Schuldig frequently told him) age of twenty-six. They were assigned as bodyguards to a high-class business mogul named Reiji Takatori, who not only needed their services as mere bodyguards but as assassins. (Education in Rosenkreuz had consisted of three main things: general education, psychic education, and killing. Every student there knew how to fight, and most of them knew how to murder.) Takatori had many powerful enemies; a team of psychics, including one who could see the future, was indispensable to him. They served him faithfully, hiding away in the basements and plotting their own world-dominating plots (ones that stretched even through the powers of Rosenkreuz and Esset, the heads of a cult of demon-worshipers). When Crawford foresaw the fall of Takatori, he took Schwarz and they simply left the man to his fate; there were other things for them to move on to.

Those other things involved the comatose younger sister of their enemy assassin group's leader, Ran Fujimiya. By using the girl, it was possible to throw the world, which Schwarz (and Crawford in particular) saw as disgusting and ripe for destruction, into complete chaos. Because they were such strong psychics, they would have no trouble surviving in that new world, so they orchestrated a plan that would shift the blame from them onto an all-female group of assassins known as Schreient. By having them kidnap the girl to try and use in resurrecting their dead master (who was one of their previous employer's son), Weiss would strike out at them; and while the chaos of battle occurred, Schwarz was able to snatch the girl right out from under everyone's noses and make a near-flawless escape.

With the girl in their power, Schwarz began the final phase of their operation: allowing Esset, the cult leaders, to believe they would get the girl to revive their dead god. Secretly, Crawford had the girl put in a different place and a nearly identical one replace her. Weiss, seeking both girls, took care of Esset and sought out Schwarz for a final showdown. The battle progressed, and Crawford, having foreseen such a battle, thought nothing of it. What he didn't foresee was himself getting shot in the hand and the entire building collapsing around them, plunging all eight men into the ocean's depths, supposedly killing them all.

Personality

Being an older man and therefore with more life experience to turn him into a hardened veteran in the world he lives in as well as a brilliant genius, Crawford is naturally jaded, skeptical of others, incredibly calculating, and extremely sure of himself. He's incredibly intelligent and can obtain information through either his own ingenuity or bribes and threats ... or simply draw it from the future that he's foreseen.

Crawford isn't, under any circumstances, a nice person. He's closer to sociopathic than most people tend to be, only showing mercy when he feels it will be to his advantage later. He kills without feeling (pleasure or otherwise) and does most of what he does out of a desire for both vengeance (for being raised so painfully in the Rosenkreuz academy, practically mentally murdered more than once) and his own future goals (pitching the world into chaos, even though his first attempt failed and nearly killed everyone he cared for in the slightest).

Aside from that, he shows very few real emotions, and tends to keep to the role of the passive-aggressive team leader: lying when it is suitable and telling the truth when it is needed.

At Landel's

At Landel's, visions no longer come to Crawford as often as they used to, only occurring when something drastic is going to happen to a person close to him. And even when the visions do come, they are faint, short, and painful, much like they used to be. The flow of the future around him is almost completely disrupted, leaving him with ridiculously strong mental shields to protect him from almost nothing. Picking out a vision from the stream is impossible for him now.

As Crawford has just arrived at Landel's, he has not been able to do much. He has, however, reconnected with Schuldig, and is beginning to form ideas about what he will do in the immediate future. Without his precognitive abilities, he feels significantly weaker than before, but refuses to outwardly admit it.

Sakki	Latest page update: made by Sakki , Apr 7 2007, 10:20 PM EDT (about this update About This Update Edited by Sakki 136 words added view changes - complete history)
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