marling | ａ　ｐｒｉｍｅｒ　ｏｎ　ｉａｉｎ　ｍａｒｌｉｎｇ　»

THE SHORT OF IT:

the thing about dreams is that whatever wounds are inflicted during them do not appear on the actual body. the pain, however, is all felt. the other thing is that time stretches out.

iain's trade is not extraction. he does not get things from people, not in the way that is typically thought of, anyway. sometimes, he gets things from people by force. but most times, he's just there to remind people of what they haven't given. he's the man to call when you want to show someone what happens when they cross you, because the thing about iain is that he knows a whole lot about pain.

iain is a jack of all trades, and a master of only what he hires himself out for. he knows enough about architecture to be able to build a world sufficient for his purposes. he knows enough about forging to give himself a new face down under, and he knows enough about point to know not to jump into bed (figuratively speaking) with just anyone.

he is, by nature, a reserved person, not given to any extremes of emotion and preferring to fly under the radar. he dresses mainly in muted colors: black, grey, and navy especially.

DETAILS:

his usual construction is a fair replica of wyeth's christina's world, although the mark will usually never know it. most of the action takes place in a kitchen. the room is large, and relatively sterile. the walls are white tile, and all around them are hung the tools that, for the duration of his contract, he will get around to using. the centerpiece is a wooden table. a stereo sits in one of the corners.

that said, he has a fondness for tape decks, and his car (a piece of junk, honestly, although it still works) still has one. as a subpoint, he can't actually drive (or he just doesn't; no one's really sure) and tends to get others to do it for him.

for a higher price, he'll bring in a special little compound that he's tampered with, which is the point at which his business segues from simply torturing and into the realm of nightmares. it's meant to induce an adrenaline-fueled state as he tries to access the greatest fears of whoever he's working on.

PEOPLE OF NOTE:

there's a shadow sewn to the bottom of his heels. not as much of a presence, now, as she was before, but more than worth noting.

THE LONG VERSION:

iain marling was born in dublin in the late sixties/early seventies, an only child.
clever from the start, iain marling entered medical school at a relatively young age, ditching his first name before attending, and becoming known to most of his friends simply as 'marling.' he never graduated, instead choosing to leave for a sort of early residency working for a series of nastier and nastier people who took care of the records that he left behind and who he, at the time, thought he could keep up with.

'residency' came in the form of patching up wounds, both real and dreamed up, as the people he worked as back alley doctor for had access to a sort of technology he'd never really thought possible previously. upon seeing how good he was with a scalpel, this grew into occasionally inflicting a few injuries, himself, in a ploy to extract information if nothing else worked. (he did not develop his preoccupation with pain here; the neuromuscular system had always been of special interest and this was simply an exploitation.) he peddled his work to whoever came forward as the highest bidder, believing himself to be hot shit and therefore relatively invulnerable even if he did work for both sides of a coin. needless to say, this did not make him an extremely popular person.

fun fact: there was a gap of about a year in which he didn't do much of the bullet point above; he got engaged for five months in the middle to a very nice girl and then summarily got dumped. this is not actually particularly significant in that it didn't change the way he acted at the time and doesn't have any effect on him now, but it did happen.

the first of his scars are the results of his getting on the wrong side of a nice little handful of people due to his nonchalant attitude. (in all honesty, most of his scars were earned the same way.) this sort of confrontation did not, initially, faze him much, despite his lack of grace as a pugilist. for a while he welcomed them, until he realized that he'd brought a knife to what turned out to be a gun fight and that, at the time, he lacked the sort of skill that wouldn't make that a great disadvantage.

following an unpleasant adventure involving chemicals that had been tampered with that ended with him nearly having his throat slit, marling fled the scene, choosing to enlist (with a shiny new set of identification materials) as a way of getting away from the mess he'd made. he was placed into an eod squad.

his squad was practically destroyed. (twelve men dead. not for any fault of marling's. he earned more scars here.)

upon his dismissal, he picked his old name back up. thanks to his old associates, iain marling didn't exist, and given what common sense dictated, he doubted that anyone would think he'd go back to using it.