Profile
Meet Konrad Jablonski! He's an OC of a friend of mine, Brownbug, who has generously allowed me to play with her toys. I've been using him for ArtFight, and am putting him here to collate visual references and other art, and provide the written descriptions for anyone looking to draw him.
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Name: Konrad Jablonski (aka “Jabbers”)
Age: 52
Species: Human
Planet of Origin: Earth
Time of Origin: Born 4 November, 1962 in St Pancras, London.
Occupation: Up until recently, he was a Detective-Sergeant at the Dartford Police Station in London. However, he has now been demoted out of the CID, and back to a uniformed officer, with the rank of Sergeant.
Physical Description: Six feet tall, with thinning dark hair, piercing blue eyes and a heavily-jowled face. Once well-built and athletic, he's now the archetypal picture of a middle-aged cop going to seed, sporting a paunch instead of a six-pack, and with eyes that are bloodshot from too many late nights and too many stiff drinks. Back when he was in CID, he was usually seen wearing a cheap, badly-cut suit. Now that he's been demoted, he's back to wearing the Sergeant's uniform of the London Metropolitan police.
Personality: When Jablonski first joined the police force, he was young and idealistic, and determined to make a real difference. As the years went by, however, the harsh realities of the job slowly hardened him, and his policing style became more about achieving results at any cost, rather than about upholding the law. A disappointing personal life also soured him, so by the time he reaches middle age, he's a bitter, cynical, hard-edged cop, who's quite capable of bending the rules whenever he needs to, although he never quite breaks them – at least, not enough to have been caught. He smokes too much and drinks too much, and his empty life is centred entirely on his job. He doesn't take well to being crossed or slighted, and is very capable of pursuing a grudge with unrelenting stubbornness. In short, he's driven and uptight and spiteful, a man who only wants results and doesn't care how he gets them, nothing more than a walking bundle of twisted resentments and prejudices.
History: After joining the police force right out of school, Jablonksi's intuitive and instinctive approach to his job was initially successful enough to enable him to move through the ranks to reach the level of Detective-Sergeant. However, by that stage, the Metropolitan Police Force was changing, becoming more politically-correct, finding it necessary to alter their procedures to meet the demands of the modern British community. Due to his arrogant attitude and his unwillingness to compromise, Jablonski soon found his movement up the promotion ladder stalled, blocked by superior officers who saw no future for a dinosaur like him in the new Met, continually passed over in favour of younger, more adaptable men.
Instead, he was shunted sideways into a position at Dartford Police Station in London and more or less left there to stagnate.
To make matters worse, his wife of twenty years, Melissa, left him, taking their teenage daughter Bianca with her. She'd moved in with her best friend Gabrielle – who apparently she'd been having an affair with for months right under his nose – and had hired a fancy lawyer to take him for everything he had. The family bungalow in Bexley had been sold, with his ex taking the lion's share of everything they had left, once the mortgage was paid off.
It was during this period, when his life had hit rock bottom, that Jablonski had his first brush with things that went beyond the usual human world. In the course of one of his cases, he arrested a man named Zagreus for the attempted murder of a ten-year old child and the kidnap of her mother. Convinced of the man's guilt, he dragged him back to the police station in handcuffs, intending to throw the book at him – only to find that Zagreus's girlfriend, Ailla, had called in a special operations group known as Torchwood. Making use of authority granted by the Crown, Captain Jack Harkness and his offsider, Fitz Kreiner, had swept into Jablonski's patch and arrogantly removed Zagreus from his custody, and he was unable to do anything to stop them.
Seething in rage and chagrin at the affront, Jablonski flagged all four of their names on the police computer, determined to keep an eye out for a chance at revenge. To his malicious delight, only a couple of years later, Fitz Kreiner's name emerged again, this time calling in a murder that had occurred at his block of flats. Pulling every string he could, Jablonski arranged for the case to be transferred to his jurisdiction, and he set out to interview Fitz, intending to make his life as miserable as he could.
Unfortunately, his dark, seething emotions turned out to be a serious liability, when he became possessed by the alien Lemures, and turned into a mindless berserker. Instead of trying to arrest Fitz, as he had originally meant, he attempted to kill him, by throwing him off the high roof of the apartment building.
Fitz survived, and the Lemures were eventually defeated, but by that stage, Jablonski had lost his job and was facing charges for assault and attempted murder. Re-enter Jack Harkness and his little white ret-con pills, and suddenly Jablonski found himself re-instated in the force – demoted, but with no record of any criminal activities, and with none of his colleagues remembering anything that had happened. The price for Jack's help? Apparently, Torchwood required a liaison inside the Metropolitan Police, and their commander had decided that Jablonski fit the bill. Left with no choice, Jablonski reluctantly agreed to all of Jack's terms.
Since then, things have hardly been boring. For a start, he has to work closely with Fitz Kreiner, no easy task considering the conflict between them in the past. And then there's the growing realisation that the safe, sensible world he thought he knew never really existed at all. Aliens, monsters, creatures from the deep – his association with Torchwood continues to push and challenge him, in ways he could never have dreamed.
For Konrad Jablonski, it's a second chance at life.
The question is – what will he do with it?
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Story sample:
Jablonski watched the younger man closely as he bent over the photographs spread before him.
The detective had intended to shock Alec by showing him the graphic images without warning, hoping to somehow trick him into slipping up. Those sort of tactics often led to a breakthrough in a case. Jablonski prided himself on being an advanced student of kinesics - the observation and interpretation of non-verbal behaviour in suspects, such as facial expression and gestures. Of course, kinesics was just the fancy name the egghead professors gave it during the psychology courses he was forced to attend from time to time. Jablonski preferred to think of it as combining experience with gut instinct to home in on any deception. That certain little niggle that a particular tell-tale gesture might bring; or an epiphany brought about by a tic under a perp's eye; or a clue from the tension-riddled slouch in their posture. He'd done it so many times before, read so many suspects like a series of open books.
But not this one.
No matter what Jablonski threw at him, Alec McDowell remained as cool as a cucumber. His body language was relaxed. His face revealed precisely nothing. And the less the detective got from him, the angrier he found himself becoming.
He listened as Alec explained the origins of his barcode and the nonsensical aspects of the ones tattooed on the necks of the armed robbers, but he refused to be convinced, his scowl merely becoming darker by the second. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he was aware that he had allowed his inexplicable dislike for the man to colour his thinking, causing him to lose his perspective on the case. But he didn't care any more. Alec McDowell was connected to these crimes somehow. He might have saved Allison Castiel today, but he was a self-confessed trained killer. In some way, he was responsible for those other shop-owners losing their lives, Jablonski could feel it deep in his gut. And no matter what it took, he intended to prove it.
“As for the victims...” Alec concluded. “Never met them before."
Jablonski slammed the flat of his hand down on the table in an explosive movement, making all the papers and pens jump into the air. “Do you think I'm stupid, McDowell?” he snarled. “Do you really think I'm going to believe that it's a coincidence that you have a barcode on the back of your neck, just like these killers? I may not be able to prove anything yet, but you'd better believe that I'm not going to stop until I do – and then even all your fancy friends in UNIT won't be able to protect you from the full extent of the law! So you'd better think about this very, very carefully, son...and if you're withholding any information relevant to this investigation, I suggest you speak up, right now, before you get yourself into one hell of a lot of trouble!”
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Art permissions:
Fine for minor injuries in the line of duty, and he has a gun (although he's an older, British cop, so he doesn't brandish it at every slightest opportunity!) so that's fine. Also we shan't deprive him of his alcohol and cigarettes - he can have those!
No to 'shipping, nudity, self-harm, suicide, abuse, gore, bodily fluids or medical procedures.
