Field Marshall Desert Wind
From Changeling Venue
| Seeming | Elemental Airtouched |
|---|---|
| Court | Summer Court ••••• |
| Freehold | Seven Hills |
| Player | Todd Branch |
Contents |
Overview
Alias(es): Desert Wind, Coach Clark
Real Name: Derek Clark
Location: Freehold of the Seven Hills - Seattle, WA
Age: Appears 30, actual 35
Seeming: Elemental
Kith: Airtouched
Court: Summer
Concept: Enforcer of the Changing of Seasons
Relevant Mechanics: Mantle (Summer) 5
Character Livejournal:
Known Information
Death must not be feared. Death, in time, comes to all of us. And every man is scared in his first action. If he says he's not, he's a goddamn liar. Some men are cowards, yes, but they fight just the same, or get the hell slammed out of them.
The real hero is the man who fights even though he's scared. Some get over their fright in a minute, under fire; others take an hour; for some it takes days; but a real man will never let the fear of death overpower his honor, his sense of duty, to his country and to his manhood.
-- General George Patton
Known History
Basic Timeline:
Born 1970 - Seattle WA
1989 - Turned down for military service due to knee injury.
1996 - Derek is Lost in a storm off the coast of Washington
9/11/2001 - Derek escapes the hedge with his motley. Derek appears in New York City during the attacks on the WTC.
10/2001 - Derek makes his way back to Seattle to discover he was was never missed. He finds the local Lost and continues using the name his elemental soldiers had given him in Fairey. Field Marshall Desert Wind.
2003 - Derek and his Motley rename themselves 89 Days. They use their experiences in Fairey to justify enforcing the changing of the seasons.
2005 - 89 Days, Derek's motley, swears an oath of fealty to the King and Queens of the Seasons.
Current Activities:
Member of the 89 Days Motley. Fealty bound to the King or Queen of the Courts during their 89 days of rule.
Merit Details:
Desert Wind is the embodiment of Summer. He is a warrior that feels the call of wrath more keenly than most.
Background:
Derek Clark was born in the early 1970’s. Like most people who were born in this generation, he grew up with pop culture and Hollywood guiding his development as much as religion or parental values. As a child, Derek loved to play with the other kids in the neighborhood. He always wanted to be the one the others looked to for leadership and guidance. His mediocre social skills, intelligence, and physical ability always limited him on his quest for childhood greatness. He watched from the bench as his best friends became quarterbacks, pitchers, and academic successes. His parents seemed to think that his mediocrity was all that could be hoped for, and never pushed him to achieve. They knew he would graduate high school, and that was enough for them.
Derek did graduate high school, unremarkable in almost every way. The idea that there was some way for someone like him to contribute to the big picture never left his dreams. A lot of options awaited Derek’s friends; they would have a lot of ways to make something of themselves. Derek, however, was limited to being good enough to stay out of jail, smart enough to avoid most overt scams, and strong enough to pull off an occasional convincing bluff at a bar. He knew he was going to be blessed if he could land a job at the local water pump factory and find some woman who would settle for a less than promising but better than nothing marriage.
When the dreams of significance came to Derek, he would often take the next few days trying to make something important happen in his life. He tried to join the Marines, but a bad knee kept him out. He tried to become a cop, but the competition and the civil service exam seemed just enough to be to much for him to overcome. Finally, looking at 30 just over the hill and still waiting on an opening at the factory, Derek had enough. After a particularly unsettling week of recurring dreams in which Derek slipped slowly from mediocrity to insignificance, Derek left town. He was hired on as a security guard in the suburbs of Seattle, making sure no one stole empty warehouses. This afforded Derek a lot of time to read about people who had exciting and meaningful lives. Derek wanted to bitch about the hand he had been dealt, but a lot of people had it worse. Not to good, not to bad. Just enough to make you crazy. Derek starting seeing things in the warehouses. He knew they weren’t real, but totally dismissing the things he saw just made the job that much more of a bore. Why not spend the night chasing around these oddly shaped shadows? Derek had a passable imagination, so he started passing his nights hunting for the shadowcritters. After a few weeks, he caught one.
As previously mentioned, Derek is not a paragon of mental prowess. While not a complete dullard or handicapped, he often acts on impulse before the complete scope of possible outcomes for his actions are clear. It was one of these nights when he chased one of the shadowcritters into an industrial freezer that had been collecting dust in the warehouse since the 1960’s. The surprise when the door shut wasn’t that big to Derek. He figured the imaginary shadowcritters were tricky. He did become slightly more concerned when he heard the compressors fire up. This security guard outfit was pretty thin, and he wasn’t expecting relief for seven hours.
Derek still remembers that chilling cold. It bit into his bones. He tried to go back deeper in the freezer, find something to use as shelter against the seemingly gale force winds that the refrigeration unit was putting out. The icicles that started forming on his nose seemed almost comical at this point, and this fucking refrigerator was bigger on the inside than it seemed. The snow that started falling as he walked deeper in should have told him how screwed he really was, but he had not focused totally on his deep and driving hate for the cold.
Trees do not grow inside your standard Frigidaire. Derek now knew for sure that he was either crazy or dead. The corpses of seven or eight people, wearing barely more than a bathing suit and frozen solid on the ground, convinced him that he was crazy. Things start to get a bit fuzzy here. Heat. Fire. Death. That was what drove Derek now. He had found the purpose for living now, his way of being special. Countless battles were fought against the encroaching wilderness and the wild beast that lived there, against the darkest of nights and the fears that turned men to babes, and most of all against the dreaded cold and the monsters who sought to extinguish the warmth of life.
Derek was not alone. At first, he fought with others. He had brothers and sisters who were born in fire and died protecting the flame. Soon, those who he stood with started looking to him for direction against the evil of the Others. Assassins would strike at him and his army, hunger and famine would decimate them. Always more would come, and more would look to him for victory. He wasn’t Derek Clark any more, he was the Field Marshall. He was Desert Wind.
The young ice-man he remembers more than most of the other things. He remembers leading a charge into the outnumbered ranks of winter archers who were setting up an ambush. The last of the ice demons to die was different, he was new. It was easy to spot them, they hadn’t become hard yet. They were still soft, from the other place. This one, however, had something to give in death. A note was found in his pocket, a note from the General of the Winter Forces to the Commander of Spring. Something was afoot.
Months passed as Derek started to correspond with the other leaders, and came finally to the realization that the others had reached long ago. We have no reason to fight. We are being used. We are but playthings. The Mountain that is not a Mountain, that is where the user lives.
It is hard to describe what rage an elemental so closely tied to summer and to the wind is capable of in Faerie. Derek… Desert Wind… wanted revenge. He did not want justice or to escape, he wanted revenge on the thing that had dared make him think he was important. He wanted to go back to being ignorant of the truth, but that was not to pass.
Hundreds, perhaps thousands, died in the assault on the Mountain that is not a Mountain. Some were real, like him. Some had gone too far into the elements and were nothing more than personifications of those primal forces. Derek remember finding the master’s chamber, along with several other of the Lost who had rebelled against User. There was nothing there. The User was gone, and only mocking laughter remained.
While the others planned a way to escape, planned a way to find their way back into the User’s graces, or just planned a way to die, Derek thought of nothing else but how it had all be a lie. He was nothing again.
Fire. Derek had served the flame, and now it would serve him. He would burn the Mountain. Panic and chaos were all around him, and the fire spread from the mountain into the Hedge… or was it the fire from the other side of the Hedge spreading into Faerie? Smoke was everywhere, and for a long time Derek just wandered amid the flames. He heard explosions, people running, people crying. Someone grabbed him by the shoulder and pulled him into an enclave of some kind, the man was wearing a uniform but not one that Derek recalled seeing on the fields of battle. What battle? Why was it raining ash?
The fireman was screaming at the top of his lungs to overcome the sounds of the sirens and the fire. The building was coming down. Time to move. Need to get back, at least past the line of fire trucks. Was Derek in the Military? Could he give a hand down by Building 12? Questions floated toward him, and slowly he saw in the eyes of those around him what he had seen in the eyes of so many before. They needed him, they wanted him to help. But where had he been a leader? He worked as a Security Guard, right?
Derek did what most people do when given the chance to help, and he did it. The fire and heat didn’t bother him, and the ash only reminded him of cursed snow. He was close to ground zero when 1 World Trade Center went down. He remembers someone helping him inside a coffee shop turned refuge. He remembers going back out, time and again, to help. To find where he was needed.
Exhaustion was something Derek was not accustomed to dealing with. He simply worked until he fell over. A week later he woke up in Maryland, with a John Doe tag hanging on his hospital bed. The first thing he saw was a television, and on it were pictures of fire and death. The Mountain had fallen. The next few weeks saw memories creep back into Derek. He could feel the pulses of anger and hate around him. People were angry. People were really angry. Derek had to get away from the remains of the Mountain, the User may return. He fled all the way to Seattle, where he could simply go no farther. Driftwood was good to Derek, and in return Derek tried to be good to Driftwood. He met others who had been at the battle of the Mountain, others who had escaped. Some had escaped from different battles, some escaped without much fighting at all.
The User, and those that he could trick, would come back. We had knocked down it’s mountain. Those first few days stayed with Derek, the anger and wrath breaking free from him seemingly without provocation. The others of the lost reluctantly admitted that Derek could be nothing other than Summer. He was already starting to exhibit the signs before he was introduced to the court. Seattle was not a kind place to be if you were of the Summer Court in 2003. Adamants Folly was fresh in the minds of the Lost. Derek knew, however, what the Folly truly was. He, and others who had done battle against him in Faerie, all believed they could win.
The Coach and the Field Marshall Mortal life since the return has been good for Derek. Through his shifty legal contact, Harrison Rhys, he got the proper paperwork to allow him to hold a job at Richard M. Nixon High School as the coach of the Bandits. The Bandits, a football team that has lost more than it has won in the past, is just the thing Coach Clark needed. With a heavy emphasis on winning instead of the modern “how you play the game” approach; the Bandits have posted three winning seasons and made it to the state playoffs in 2006. The grateful parents and faculty have taken the increase in injuries and unsportsmanlike conduct penalties as the price of winning. The coach is loud and boisterous, but is often more talk than action. An irritant to some of the Lost, they see Coach Clark as a necessary link to Derek’s morality.
Soon after his return, Derek began having dreams. At first, they were vague and made little sense. It is always fire and wind, always death. During a visit to the hedge in 2002, something very bad happened. A group of Hobgoblins attacked his motley, and the memories of Faerie came back. He was a warrior of the elements, he had to start the killing again. Once done, the entire 89 days motley was forced to reconcile their relapse into the roles their keeper placed upon them. Derek embraced his duty, and became Field Marshall Desert Wind once again. Those who know the Field Marshall respect his judgment and prowess in combat. Those who know him to well question how far he is willing to go to extract vengeance on the enemies of the Lost.
Some people say he has a fractured personality, but those who know him best disagree. He has taken the roles he plays in life, both mortal and changeling, and attached separate persona’s. When he puts on his “Coach’s Hat”, he tries to block out the screaming, killing, and torture that must be foremost in his thoughts when he is the Field Marshall.
Associations & Associates
Motley: 89 Days
Character Inspirations
- Clint Eastwood as Harry Callahan (Dirty Harry)
- George C Scott as General George Patton (Patton)
Soundtrack
Quotes
- "I like Mr. Desert Man. You know it's so, when a hot Summer breeze blows cold. The whites of his eyes when he looks at me tell me that I do my job very well. I'm glad, because he does his job well, too." - Tommy Blue
- "If war teaches you anything it's that command is a burden not many can bear. I can't say that I'd follow Wind to Hell and back, but then again I can't say that I wouldn't." - Horace "Race" Ardent
- "I wouldn't doubt it for a minute that Wind was shocked when he discovered Spring wasn't all flowers and bunnies. It must have come as something of a shock when he fought his first battle against us. But life is like that--full of reversals. Here's a man that systematically tried to torture and kill everthing and everyone I ever cared about, and yet I call him "friend". - Vera Greensborough
- "Izzat four stars on 'is ballcap?" - Clyde
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Rumors
- Desert Wind is such a wildcard that Harrison Rhys once tried to saddle him with Clyde as a chaperone... like that's an improvement...
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