Frank

Frank
Department	Welfare Team
Layer	- Briah
Assignment	Der Freischutz Child of the Galaxy Dream of a Black Swan The Knight of Despair
Equipment
Equipment	E.G.O Weapon - Pink E.G.O SuitMagic Bullet E.G.O Gift-Magic Bullet -Galaxy -The Sword Sharpened by Tears -Black Swan -Discord

”I have my responsibilities here. Maybe things would have been more ‘normal’ if I had stayed as a Fixer but I still would have been risking my life every single day. At least this way I don’t have to worry about the cost of bullets."
―Frank

Frank is the Welfare Captain. The player meets him shortly after unlocking Welfare.

Frank is a young man slightly above average height, with pale skin, very long plum-colored hair he wears in a high ponytail, and piercing red eyes. He’s very toned and athletic, and although he’s not bulky most of his body seemed to be made of muscle.

Frank is an experienced employee, and his role has Captain has him working with high level Abnormalities. Mostly WAW-level, but he has been shown to be able to work with almost every Abnormality in the facility if he needs to.
He seems to have a strong bond with Der Freischutz, and is assigned to work with him regularly because Frank always seems to get a good result. Occasionally he actually sparks concern by speaking about Der Freischutz with familiarity, but if anyone brings it up to him he’s quick to point out that it’s not like he considers the Abnormality a friend. He knows very well Der Freischutz could kill him if he managed to annoy the abnormality. They just have a...strange respect for each other. Frank says it’s because they have the same feel, much to the confusion of the other employees.

Frank also works with Child of the Galaxy frequently, if only because he always gets a good result. This confuses him, and he isn’t sure why but he goes along with it if it means he can do his job.

Personality

Frank comes across as very contained when you first meet him. The other employees, and the people who work under him, have commented on it. Yet at the same time he’s generally well-respected by them. He’s polite, social, and tends to treat almost everyone with a certain level of courtesy even though he’s known to be a bit blunt at times. Frank is also not generally considered intimidating despite his background as a Fixer.
Or at least most of the time he’s not considered intimidating. People who haven’t worked with him in suppressions certainly commented on it. But the other people in his department will half-jokingly and half-fearfully talk about what they call his ‘work mode’. Some of them will call it his ‘kill mode’, especially right after they’ve seen it in action. Because when he’s concentrating on something like a suppression or dealing with an out of control employee he becomes very strict and to the point. There is a job that needs doing, and if they don’t respond fast then even more death and chaos will follow. He doesn’t have time for niceties at that point, at least in his view, and he’s going to do the job he was brought here to do. There’s no room for doubts or hesitations when he’s that focused, no matter what he has to do. He’ll deal with the emotional fallout after he survives.
Frank does tend to make people wonder why he isn’t affected by what he has to do, but that’s not really because he feels nothing. It’s more that he’s just accepted that life is unfair and horrible. If you want to survive you just have to deal with it. He isn’t exactly happy about it but he knows that’s just what reality is. When he was younger he worried about his reaction more but he shoved that part of his conscious down to maintain his sanity. The only concessions he makes to it anymore, that no one but himself knows about, is that he writes down the names of those he has to take out on a piece of paper then burn it. It’s his own way of honoring them in a sense.
And he does have a sense of responsibility to the jobs he’s given. He works hard to keep up with his duties as Captain, and that includes trying to look after the employees in his department. Or at the very least keep them alive as long as he can.
Frank also seems to have a hard time with close relationships. It’s not like he’s actively pushing people away, just never letting them in. Some people might call it a defense against everything happening in Lobotomy and a smart one at that. Frank has become good at pretending it isn’t occasionally lonely. Yet despite him coming off as solitary, he actually doesn’t like to be alone. It leaves him alone, with just his thoughts for company, something he’s not fond of.

Story

History

Frank doesn’t remember his parents. Or at least, his memories are more faint shadow-sketches than actual people. He isn’t quite sure what happened to them; whether they died or just abandoned him as some parents did in the Backstreets. All he knows is that his first memories are of scrambling for survival with a group of orphans. He isn’t sure how they all ended up together in an apartment for a while- it might have been one of the ‘charity’ vanity projects of one of the more well-off Nest dwellers. Homes like that tended to be done for purposes that were anything but benign, or tended to ended up fading out overtime as the person supplying the money lost interest.
That was what happened to his little group when he was a bit older. Granted they had never exactly been prosperous - they’d had to find their own food if they didn’t want to starve - but losing even the roof over their head was a blow. For a while they stuck together out of sheer necessity - easier to survive in a group in the Backstreets, especially when it would be easy for a kid to get picked off without anyone caring. You either learned to fight to survive and how to avoid Sweepers or you ended up just another corpse. Frank picked that up fast, even as their group started to dwindle and split off.
Frank himself learned how to fight, and fight hard. He also discovered he had a gift for being almost terrifyingly accurate with most types of weapons, and used that to survive as best he could. By the time he was a teenager most of his original group had either died or drifted away as they found a way to live in the backstreets, and Frank realized he had a choice to make himself. He didn’t particularly want to end up as just another Rat scrambling for survival, and he couldn’t think of many other things to do. After careful thought he realized he had at least one avenue that could be open to him. So he kept his ear to the ground and when he heard of a nearby Fixer office that was short-handed at the moment, he showed up asking for a job.
He was laughed off, but he had actually expected that. He tried his luck at all the offices he thought he might have a chance at getting in. There were other ways to become a Fixer, other than hoping an office would be willing to risk taking in a teenager they knew nothing about. But sheer persistence kept him trying, and over time he actually started to develop a bit of a reputation of his own, at least when it came to being able to defend himself and do the jobs he took to make sure he didn’t starve.
Eventually his persistence paid off and he was accepted into Falcon Office, under the thought that if he was this focused he might end up being pretty good. As he started taking on jobs with Falcon, he discovered that his sense of accuracy extended into firearms. If he aimed the gun at something he almost alway hit it. After a while he began to specialize in using them, despite the expense. Some of the senior members of the office and even the head of the office would tease him about almost exclusively using guns. Sometimes it was less teasing, more urging him to branch out because it would mean less expense if he would just use something different. As it was sometimes Frank barely broke even with the cost of bullets sometimes, and had trouble making enough to eat. It cost the office too, and even though Frank had started to gain some notoriety for his weapon choice, they weren’t sure it evened out. But Frank was stubborn and swore he would just get better. Since he was still getting results they let him have his gun.
He became very good at picking his shots and wasting as few bullets as possible as he completed even more difficult jobs and slowly climbed up the ranks. By the time he was declared a rank 5, he had cemented a reputation for succeeding even when people swore firearms would be useless. It actually brought more people to the Office, but the reputation was also a bit of a double-edged sword. No matter who he had been said to have taken out there were people who doubted that he could naturally be that good with a fireman, assuming he was using some sort of other augmented weapon or had arguments himself. Frank normally just shrugs those kind of misunderstandings off, but he’s aware that they’re part of a bigger problem. In the jockeying among Offices for lucrative jobs, it’s not unusual for rumors downplaying the success of one Office to pop up so that other Offices might look good. If they can make people doubt that Frank really is capable of what he says, or wonder if he’s really actually accomplished as much as people say he has, it could extend to people wondering how good Falcon Office was as a whole. But they were expecting and adjusted to it.
Still, Frank’s struggle to balance what he was earning with the cost of his choice of weapon was a constant thing. Sometime, as he considered his budget, he thought about just going with the suggestions of his coworkers to just use….something else. But he could never bring himself to actually do it.
It was a little while after he had been made a rank 5 that he got a letter inviting him to come work at Lobotomy Corporation. That letter completely blindsided him. What had he done to catch the attention of a Wing? They hadn’t done any job recently that would have caught their eye.
But still, his coworkers at the Office were both shocked and pleased about it. Maybe a bit envious too, since it was an invitation from a Wing. Who would turn that down? But it also brought the Office as a whole a bit of attention. After all, if one of their own was good enough to be scouted by a Wing, it reflected pretty well on the Office. So Frank accepted the offer without any guilt and left to join Lobotomy Corporation.

Plot

He had expected that he had been hired either for security purposes or as a more covert agent. Why else would they bother seeking out a Fixer if they didn’t have that in mind for him? Once he started training, he slowly started to realize that it was for both reasons, though not in the way he had ever expected. The initial training was about what he would have expected for most of Wings - NDAs, corporate stuff. Then they were shifted over to combat training. All of them. And he started realizing something was very off. When they were introduced to the small firearms that ‘average employees’ were to be issued, Frank had the gun loaded and a clip emptied into the bullseye of the target before the instructor had finished explaining anything.
He was moved to the Training department and finally introduced to Abnormalities. It was a lot for him to take in at once and he actually hesitated for the first time in a long time. But he had no other choice and just made sure he paid attention to everything about them.
He was moved over to Information after his training was complete, and spent some time there. The first time he was called out to deal with an abnormality breach, it was to assist in taking down Snow White’s Apple. He had thought he was used to dealing with shocking things. He wasn’t prepared to find the carnage that it had caused as it took over several of the hallways in Safety. Nor was he prepared for what it would be like facing an Abnormality outside of a containment unit. Still, he had a job and channeled all his fear into focus so that he could keep himself and the team he was with alive.
The rest of the suppression was a bit of a blur, but he got compliments on how well he conducted himself so he supposed that it went well.
When the Welfare Captain was killed by an abnormality during a breach, Frank found himself transfered over to Welfare and granted the title. Most other employees who knew his background had expected that he was brought on to be made a Captain anyway, so they were unsurprised by it.
Frank didn’t know what to make of Chesed at first. He got along with his Sephira generally, but also thought that Chesed would be a bit...distant should be making more bold decisions. At times Frank himself would actually step up to make a suggestion if someone asked Chesed about something. He would always turn to get Chesed’s confirmation about something before actually doing it, but usually would take the initiative if he could.
Still, despite that, he found himself actually enjoying Chesed’s company and the two developed a habit of having coffee together before the work day really started.
Frank also developed a habit of doing a quick patrol through Welfare before the end of the day, or before he took a quick break, just to double-check that things were secure. He would swear that things looked completely secure one day before he stepped out for a break. The alarms went off after he’d barely managed to catch his breath and relax for a few minutes. He ran back to find that there hadn’t been just one breach. There had been three. He was stunned into nearly freezing, but then shook it off and ran to try and help get things under control.
They lost a good chunk of the department before it was over. Frank still couldn’t believe how easily it had happened. Chesed assured him that there was nothing that he could have done, it was nothing more than a malfunction. Still, Frank was annoyed, and blamed himself. Not only because some many he was directly responsible for, but because he had been so unobservant he didn’t notice something was wrong. He took to double checking everything again, and searching for what could have gone wrong. He hasn’t been able to find anything. It’s frustrating for him.
.

Trivia

• Frank knows that he doesn’t actually have to perform normal maintenance on EGO guns, but he still goes through the motions out of habit and because it feels wrong when he doesn’t. It’s almost a comfort thing for him.
• Although he dislike how weak the guns that they give the clerks are - he calls them peashooters and claims they have no stopping power at the best of times - he still thinks they should get better training to make the most of them if Lobotomy is going to go through the motions and hand the guns out. He sent a politely worded memo to Hod once, requesting better training, but nothing ever came out if.
• He does offer to give people in his department additional firearms training himself if they want it, but not many people ever take him up on his offer.
• He still has the old gun he took off a Rat that tried to jump him when he was much younger. It was the first gun he ever actually owned. He doesn’t ever use it anymore, but it’s a sort of good luck charm to him.