Ridley Gibbons
Mr. Ridley Charles Gibbons
Written by: Tahoma
Ridley Gibbons, sharply dressed and sharply tusked esteemed head honcho of the The Black Unicorn Society and the Second Empire restaurant and tavern, and a personal idol of mine for being the living embodiment of what a nice suit and a good haircut can do for you, even if you're an Ork.Too bad it did nothing for you, eh Tahoma?Despite having an infamous taste for the finer things in life, Ridley goes far out of his way to present himself as being a working man, involving himself personally in the business of his subordinates and acting with the same working-man buddy-buddy attitude he had from back when he was on the bottom of the food-chain, something which has endeared himself to a lot of the more lower-class associates of his criminal outfit, especially the numerous Orks and Trolls he's gone out of his way to provide decent (albeit illegal) employment for. But of course, as chummy as he is for a mob-boss, Ridley is at the end of the day still a mob-boss, and one who holds his ideas of decorum and respect sacrosanct. If he wants something from you he'll make you a pretty reasonable offer for it, but if you turn him down too many time or if he feels like you're not showing him the respect he feels he deserves, there's gonna be no hesitation in reminding you how much he can make your life a living hell. If you're lucky, he'll just take what he wants and leave you with a few broken fingers, but if you really tick him off, he'll go far out of his way to make an example out of you for the next poor schmuck to see. If you visit his restaurant, wipe your feet before you walk in, chummer.
Physical Description
General Physical Condition
Getting ahold of Gibbons' medical history wasn't exactly easy, what with the great pains he takes to see private health-providors and keep his paper-trail hidden, but a friend of mine was able to get us a sneak-peak, leaked from his last checkup. Despite being an Ork, Ridley's doing pretty fine for a guy in his seventies. The only medical complications are a couple of congenital heart-defects that started around the time he Goblinized which are being treated with medication and the replacement of a valve with a prosthesis, and a less-than-stellar eyesight that surprisingly hasn't been corrected through surgery or cybereyes, with Ridley instead comissioning a custom-made pair of corrective spectacles.
Mental characteristics
Personal history
Ridley was born in 1998 and raised in a quaint little neighborhood in Brooklyn, and by 'quaint' I mean 'bullet-ridden'. I ain't gonna name names, but Ridley happened to grow up in a part of the city that happened to be popular with what seemed like every drug-trafficking route going in or through the US at the time, which mixed well with the local gang conflict into a nice active warzone.
It's okay, you can say Vinegar Hill. We don't mind ;)Ridley's parents tried their best to keep their kid out of the game, and to their glee they actually managed to do exactly that for a good long while. The kid endured the ribbing he got from his peers for being a goodie two-shoes and made it through public-education with an associate's degree in business and only a few flesh-wounds. Little Ridley was already putting together a resume and putting his savings into a crisp new suit for the interviews he'd applied for, all full of hope at the idea of being an unlikely success story of his generation. But then 2021 hit, and boy oh boy, was it not a good year for little Ridley. The kid was one of the poor 10% of humans who experienced the first big wave of 'Goblinization', turning him from a lanky human into a decidedly less-lanky Ork, on the way to his first interview, no less. The transformation was reportedly pretty traumatic, spooked a bystander into tasing the poor slot and to top it all off, it ruined his new suit. So Ridley's entry into the world of business wasn't great, and with reactionary anti-metahuman rhetoric experiencing its first big rocket upwards, it was only gonna get worse. But the guy tried his best to keep making it happen, taking any minimum-wage job that would tolerate his tusked-face and working crap hours while he tried to start again, and again. If nothing else, he was a pretty optimistic guy, letting bigotry and exploitation slide like water off a duck's back and paying back what little kindness he got tenfold. But of course, that confidence didn't change the fact that he was always gonna be an Ork, and any remedy to the institutional suspicion of tusks would be years off at best. Not-to-little Ridley decided that if no business was gonna hire him, he'd start his own business and use that to help his fellow Orks up out of the drek. Only problem was, naturally, money: Minimum-wage doesn't exactly make for a good nest-egg, and he couldn't even try to see if he could get approved for a loan, 'cause the last time he walked into a bank in person he got tased waiting in line. He needed an investment, and unfortunately he knew exactly who to go to for it. Sergio Busacca was the top dog on Ridley's old neighborhood, a real old school shot-caller for the local Italian-American mob. He never cared for the little Gibbons brat, always irked by what he felt was a pompous sense of superiority the kid had over the rest of his neighborhood, but when Ridley came to his cafe stammering out his idea for a metahuman-friendly business, while painfully naive and not all well thought-out, plucked a string in Sergio's shrivelled heart, for two good reasons: First reason, and least surprising one, is that 'Big Busacca' liked seeing Ridley begging for his help after so many years spent holding himself above his neighborhood. The second reason was that Sergio's nephew, Tony, had the bad luck of undergoing the same Goblinization as Ridley, and if nothing else, Sergio had a soft-spot for his family, and people like Ridley were an unfortunate necessity if he ever wanted his nephew to make it legitimately, instead of jacking cars for a living. So he agreed to give Ridley the loan he asked for, with the only caveat being an appropriately obscene interest-rate that Sergio hinted could be reduced with the occasional 'favor'. Ridley accepted Sergio's terms for lack of better options, but despite how humbled he was for having to ask to borrow from Sergio in the first place, he still couldn't let himself get swallowed into criminal enterprises, and so when Ridley finally started his business in sanitation and waste-management, he cut out every single luxury from his life and stretched every penny as far as it would go, intending to pay off Sergio's loan legitimately or die trying, all while treating his new employees - mostly Orks and Trolls - with the kind of respect and kindness he'd recieved from some of the better employees he had as a kid. And to everyone's surprise, he didn't die: After a scant few years, of depressingly frugal living and applying all his business-smarts from his old education, Ridley managed to make a name for himself dealing with the unstoppably expanding by-product of megacorporate industry with his crack-team of cleaners under the name Gibbons Applied-Sanitation, and eventually he was able to pay back his debts in full without having to give further leverage to Sergio Busacca. Sergio himself couldn't care less, having got his money in the end, and even expressed a sliver of pride for Ridley, not that he'd ever publically admit it. Despite this however, Ridley ended up going to substantial expense to move his business and as many of his employees as he could manage south to our cosy little town of Raleigh, unable to scratch the paranoid itch that Sergio was gonna call him back for some kind of illegitimate favor, debt or no debt. The decision would be finalized in 2034 when the CAS was founded, and Ridley along with several of the employees that chose to stay with him would no longer be citizens of the UCAS and by extention, New York City. Ridley's business became as much of an unsung hero in North Carolina, with a lot of small businesses owing their continued existence to the non-too-picky clean-up crews protecting them from the blight and pollution leaking over from the larger corps, and Ridley himself soon found himself invited into the folds of the The Black Unicorn Society, an exclusive club for succesful, 'self-made' business-owners that solidified the Ork's feeling of having finally earned the legitimate success he'd been coveting since he was a kid, going so far as to personally invest in the society and its homebase, a restaurant/tavern called the Second Empire, when its members suffered serious financial losses from the growing megacorporate-consolidation running rampant this century.
Hold up. You're telling me the Ork who had trouble getting a loan got an invitation to one of those rich-people outfits? They're the ones that didn't care he was an Ork?
People let go of their prejudice a lot more easily when there's money involve. Didn't matter what color my skin was when I had lots of green, know what I'm sayin'?Ironically, Ridley ended up being the one who went back to the Busacca family for help in 2046, when a Saeder-Krupp rep by the name of Mariya Duran began making the lives of the already financially-strained members of the society a living hell when her demands to be sold the Second Empire were rebuffed. Duran was going through every trick in the handbook of corporate sabotage to financially throw the Black Unicorn Society under the proverbial bus, and the society's venerable members simply didn't have the same knowledge of modern predatory business practices, forcing them to eventually sell the Second Empire to Mrs. Duran and effectively disband the Black Unicorn Society. Once again, Ridley was about to lose everything for something he had no control over, and so once again, he came to the Busaccas for help, only this time he was no longer interested in playing legitimately, not if it just meant getting screwed over by the system again. Now Sergio Busacca had already died a few years back by this point, him and his family getting shredded in an ambush by a rival family. But wouldn't you know it, his Ork nephew Tony was the one who inherited the family's business, and Sergio apparently left a good impression of Ridley on Tony, because when 'Mr. Gibbons' contacted him and told him what had happened, Tony Busacca was instantly on-board with the plan. If the world wasn't gonna let an Ork have some legitimate success, then they'd have it illegitimately. Tony gave Ridley the contact details of some of Raleigh's finer representatives of the underworld, and even put in a good word with them on Ridley's behalf, while Ridley himself made new plans, this time unfettered by his own principals of staying clean. Nobody's quite sure what exactly happened that evening, only that it ended with the Second Empire back in the hands of the Black Unicorn Society, and Mariya Duran decapitated in the backrooms. Since then, Mr. Gibbons has been aggressively pursuing to retake the wealth lost by him and his friends from the rise of the megacorporations by way of organised crime and political corruption, and while he goes far out of his way to keep his new enterprises seperated from his legitimate sanitation business, he's basically thrown in the towel on his dreams of being a legitimate success-story.
Education
Ridley's got a pretty decent pedigree, at least as far as an Ork from the bad parts of Brooklyn can have. Full high-school graduation, an associate's degree in business and several online courses on economics on top of that.
Employment
Currently, Gibbons is the founder and CEO of his own company, Gibbons Applied-Sanitation, as well as the current legal-owner and manager of the Second Empire restaurant and tavern.
Personality Characteristics
Savvies & Ineptitudes
Kind of a no-brainer, but Ridley is if nothing else an absolute beast of a businessman, accurately keeping track of all sorts of numbers by memory alone and seizing opportunities with the kind of calculated maneuvering that'd make you think he'd planned it years in advance. Of course, for all his savvies in finance the guy is as much of a pushover in a fight as you'd expect from a business-owner, despite his newfound ties to the criminal underworld and the rarity in which he actually has to get his hands dirty.
Wealth & Financial state
The numbers on his 'unaccounted' wealth are a complete mystery, but as of 2080 the guy's streak of being a multimillionaire since his acquisition of the Second Empire hasn't been threatened once, with his current net-worth floating around 9,900,000¥ and at least two large residential properties in Raleigh to his name.
Current Location
Year of Birth
2007
73 Years old
Birthplace
Broolyn, NYC
Children
Pronouns
He/Him
Eyes
Blue
Hair
Grey/White
Skin Tone/Pigmentation
Tanned
Height
6'2''
Weight
234 lb.
Aligned Organization
Ruled Locations
Comments