Secure:Madeline Stafford
From Megaman Mush Wiki
| Maddy | |
| |
| Code Name | Number 8 |
| Real Name | Madeline Stafford |
| Creator(s) | {{{creator}}} |
| Serial Number | {{{sn}}} |
| Faction | Nebula Syndicate |
| Function | Ace Of Wands |
| Primary Specialty | Soldier of Fate |
| Secondary Specialty | Wild Party Girl |
| IC E-Mail | {{{icemail}}} |
| Divisions | {{{divisions}}} |
| Weapon | Hard Takedown |
| Weapon Type | BLUNT |
| Buster | Orange and Yellow |
"Don't get even, get Maddy."
Contents |
Profile
Madeline "Maddy" Stafford is the youngest daughter of a prestigious English family. She was a spoiled rich girl, living the high life on her family's wealth and being blissfully ignorant of how dirty that money actually was. Bankers by trade, the Staffords had close connections with the Housemans, and Reginald Stafford was one of James Houseman IV's closest confidants. Maddy herself was once close to James V. However, when things went bad for the Houseman patriarch, things also went bad for Reginald. He "disappeared" one evening with MI6 men and never returned. Disgraced and hated, the Staffords fled to America. Madeline, however, would have none of it. Refusing to be pushed around or knocked down without a fight, Madeline joined up with a mercenary company to learn about combat. The following six months of hard training and deadly firefights taught her a lot about life and herself, and some improvement for the better occurred. She entered the employ of Count Alexius, where she began to have many adventures. Maddy has become romantically entangled with Daryn Luna, which has started to change her earlier orientation toward revenge. So far, she's found learning how to be a soldier a lot easier than learning how to love herself.
Trivia
- Maddy's natural hair color is blonde. She genetically dyed it to pink when she was 15.
- Maddy likes alt-rock and is a big fan of Order and Chaos. A big fan.
- Maddy inexplicably likes strawberry shortcake.
- Maddy has two older siblings; Alyssa, 27, and Jacob, 28.
- Maddy dislikes Solo.
- Maddy <3 Daryn.
- Maddy uses the same power armor design as Solo.
- Maddy has a horrifying MySpace.
Gospel Data
Background
Madeline Stafford is the youngest child of Reginald Stafford and Laura Stafford-Hazleton. She has an older sister, Alyssa, two years ahead of her, and an older brother, Jacob, three years ahead. The Stafford family lived down the way from the Houseman estate for generations. Reginald and James IV were business associates and friends, having formed ties back in their schoolboy days.
Madeline herself does not have a background that particularly screams danger. She went to various private schools and was a fair student. At some point in their teenage years, Maddy and James V were romantically involved, but it disintegrated when James when to Oxford and Maddy went to Cambridge.
Maddy was a lot of fun in college. She pledged into Gamma Gamma Delta, a "party" sorority, and majored in business like most of her sisters. She barely maintained an acceptable GPA and has several arrests on record for public drunkenness, disorderly conduct, and a particularly flagrant incident of public indecency which is probably on Collegehumor.com still. Perhaps this was her rebellious period.
The coup came when Maddy was in her fifth year of her undergrad degree. (Blame calculus.) Reginald was implicated as a 'person of interest'. MI6 took him away in the dead of night, and the press found out three days later. He's never been seen again. Most people think he was executed for treason in those chaotic first days.
Maddy was destroyed by her father's death. She had unresolved issues with Reginald, and her rebellion turned into rage against the government. Then, of course, the media tore into any Houseman associate brutally. Maddy and her entire family were humiliated in the British press as the people demanded villains to throw garbage at. They were forced into an American exile, where her mother and siblings continue to live in as much obscurity as they can manage.
Maddy did not take the public shaming and the destruction of her family's honor and dignity well. She threw herself into her schoolwork, graduated from Cambridge with her business degree, and liquidated everything she owned. She pulled herself totally out of the bright economy and apparently went underground. She apparently joined a mercenary company in Europe and somehow ended up an associate of the Count.
Riot's Investigations
You hit the streets to find out more about Madeline Stafford. Your first stop is the Islington records office in England. Her birth certificate says she was born on April 4, 2194, making her 25. She is the daughter of Reginald Stafford and Laura Stafford-Hazleton. Both the Staffords and the Hazletons are well-respected families in the area, going back to the very earliest days of records. They've always been rich and well-landed, and nobility is weaved into both family lines.
The Hazletons still live in Islington, but the Staffords have moved away. If you spend some time in the area, you can encounter Maude Hazleton, Laura's mother. Maude is initially apprehensive of you, but when the matter of Madeline comes up, she loosens her tongue. "A troubled girl," she says. "Are you here to find someone to identify a body?" When you claim not to be, she seems only slightly relieved. "She's been nothing but trouble her whole life. Too spirited, that's her problem. Too much spirit, but a sweet girl. She means well."
Maude, as all grandmothers do, is an expert on Madeline's early upbringing. She has Crayon drawings Madeline did in her early years of pink ponies and rainbows and other such things, old arts and crafts projects from her various private schools, awards she won for penmanship and other meaningless trivia, and so on. You are surprised to learn that Maddy is actually a blonde; the family pictures over the years show her as having radiant blonde hair until she was 15 years old, when it was abruptly colored pink. "Genetic dye," Maude says, disdainfully. "Laura was beside herself. /Beside/ herself."
Madeline has brothers and sisters. She has an older sister, Alyssa, 27, and an older brother, Jacob, 28. You get an earful about them as well. Alyssa is apparently an investment banker working in Hong Kong, and Jacob has gone on to be an executive at the Bank of England. Laura is living in New York in a flat overlooking Central Park, and has apparently been in therapy continuously since the "disappearance" of her husband, Reginald.
"The government men killed him," Maude says. "You would have never known. I always liked Reggie, but he was friends with the Houseman boy, and you saw how that turned out."
Naturally, this leads to a discussion of Kraft. You see many pictures of pink-haired Maddy and a young James V at family functions. Maddy is usually holding his hand or draped around him in some wacky pose. "Such a good man," Maude says about Kraft. "It's a shame they went away to different schools. Perhaps he could have tamed her. But it's for the best, of course, considering how they murdered his family."
Maude won't produce much else than that; she notably does not talk about Maddy's time in college or the circumstances of Kraft's breakup. Rather than pushing your luck, you follow your other leads.
Part 2
Jacob Stafford is married to Margaret Breckler, another society person. He looks a lot like his father; brown hair, blue eyes, a strong jaw. The two have a young son, Andrew. Jacob is hesitant to talk, fearing reprecussions, but can be gradually won over with a strong enough cover story. Jacob managed Maddy's money while she was in school, helping her build up an investment porfolio. "Of course, she leaked money like a bloody siv," he says. "It was hard to drum responsibility into her. She was always going out and drinking, buying dresses, all that. And I kept telling her, me and my father, 'Madeline, you've got to think about the future'. But hah, see where that got us."
Jacob avoids talking about Maddy's time at college. "That's really more Alyssa's area," he says. He attributes most of Maddy's "troubles", as he calls them, to Maddy and her father constantly butting heads. "Madeline always wanted it her way," she says, "and father would patiently guide her toward the right path. He was a smart man, and he loved us all very much. It was just the company he kept that did him in. The damned company he kept. But we didn't know that until the very end. It was just teen rebellion -- of course, that's how he tricked her into going out with James Houseman. Reginald claimed he objected to Maddy dating him when they first started going out. And, well, after that the two were inseparable." He laughs a little at a memory. "If he just hadn't gone off to Oxford."
That's about all you can get from Jacob. Jacob gives you his card and asks you to pass along an invitation to go golfing with some of the Bank of England executives to Kraft.
Laura won't talk to you. However, there are things you can learn if you pour over the newspapers. Laura apparently moved to New York with her children for a year or two after her husband's "disappearance" by MI6. Her various friends kept towing her to society parties, but she really became more of a curiosity than an active participant. Laura's other children found work elsewhere, and she has occasionally entertained suitors since. The Stafford fortune is not inconsiderable.
Going back through old newspapers, you can trace the progression of the Stafford/Hazleton romance in the society pages of the Times. Apparently the two were introduced by James Houseman IV, who was a close business associate of Reginald (which is probably what led to Reginald's "disappearance"). The two became an item and had a lavish wedding, and shortly thereafter began producing progeny. They were generally considered a pillar of the social community in Islington, right alongside the Houseman family.
It's sad to see how far they fell. The newspapers savaged any Houseman associate. Old television shows would demonize these people as some sort of national Houseman exorcism. The Staffords were all but run out of England on a rail, tarred, feathered, humiliated. Maddy appeared to have earned her 15 minutes of fame by being lampooned for being a drunken woman of low morals. Some of the things she was accused of are not suitable topics for a family MUSH.
Part 3
Alyssa Stafford is a thinner, taller, sleeker version of Maddy. She keeps her blonde hair in a wedge and wears clothing more expensive than most people's personal cars. You make an appointment and stop in to talk to Alyssa, who is not terribly eager to talk. However, she is willing to give you more gossip about Maddy. One of the first questions out of her mouth is "Is she dead?" followed by "Have you locked her up?"
Alyssa has a favorable opinion of Maddy, despite these questions. Kraft apparently went off to Oxford, while Maddy had a legacy entry into Cambridge. Like Maddy, Alyssa is a Gamma Gamma Delta sister, and tried to look after her wayward sibling. "It was a party sorority, and Maddy loved to party," she says. "Father was always pressuring her to be more like me, and that made her rebel all the harder. The pink hair's the least of your worries when it comes to her. She drank like it was going out of style and was arrested a bunch of times."
Alyssa's story becomes less light-hearted after that. "After they killed father, we all got it pretty hard. The press went into our lives to try to destroy us. I got off relatively light, but Maddy had done too much too often. They put up all sorts of embarassing pictures in the Sun, and then there was that awful video." Alyssa seems very depressed when 'the video' comes up. By now, Riot has no doubt seen it. It's best not to dwell on its specifics. "Between that and how slow she was moving through university, we all thought she was going to slit her wrists or hang herself. It was a dark time."
Alyssa exhales. "But she pulled out of it. She threw herself into her business degree, made the dean's list for the last year, and got out. After that, she sold everything she owned and disappeared. We haven't seen her since. Maybe she went to start a new life somewhere. We've always thought she was dead."
Alyssa doesn't know anything else. She passes along her card and asks Riot to call if he hears anything about Maddy. "She hasn't spoken to anyone. She just fell off the face of the Earth. We don't know if she's dead or alive, and my mother is terrified something happened to her. You'll tell us if you find her, won't you?"
That pretty much runs you out of family. Fortunately, there are other places you can look to learn more. Gamma Gamma Delta, just off the Cambridge campus, is honored to help out a real life Maverick Hunter ("Can you ask if Kraft would like to come by?" "He's super hot." "He could talk about /banking/." "Oh, we love banking, banking is fab." "Or whatever.") and so will dig up old yearbooks.
You don't recognize any of Maddy's associates as being special or unique. Nobody else on the Watch List appears. You pick up some promotional literature on your way out, including a Rush Week pitch for one of Gamma Gamma Delta's "sister" sororities, Alpha Omega Mu. ("Alphas are so nerdy." "God, and so stuck up." "We send the plain girls there. They seem to get along better with their own kind." "Hah! The dorky kind." "Shut up! That's not nice! Not everyone can be as pretty as us." "Go Gamma Gamma Go!" "Yaayyyy!")
Part 4
Based on your brief inspection of the yearbooks, you start going through the alumni phone bank to locate someone who knew Maddy well. Luckily, one of Maddy's friends is still in the Cambridge area. Olivia Nowell, 24, was in the same class Madeline was. Olivia, another business major, is the owner of a custom beef cloning facility that caters to elite restaurants around the world. She built it up from nothing with only a small business loan and a very refined palate. She's a green-eyed brunette, short with a elfish build.
"Maddy really had to pull herself up by her heels," Olivia said. "She was mad at her dad up until the day he died. After that, she hated herself for hating him. But what could she do? The government wouldn't listen. They were trying to run her family out of the country. People looked down on her. The only people who wouldn't leave her were us," meaning her sorority sisters. "because we knew she had a good heart. We made sure she made it to and from class safely. The rest was up to her. She didn't let us down."
Olivia supported Maddy a lot during those hard days. "She was distant from us. She had her own way of showing her gratitude. I don't think she really could open herself up while everyone was calling her horrible names. Sometimes she'd just go in the gym and lay into the giant bag for an hour rather than talking to anyone. Then, one day, she graduated, and then she was gone. She left us a note thanking us. That's the last anyone heard of her. It was really very sad." Like the others, Olivia asks Riot to get back to her if he hears anything.
Everything just seems to dry up after she graduates college. Time and time again, you try to find any active connections and come up bare. It's clear that her father's death changed her; what was once a wild party girl became a lonely, driven woman. You know from what you've already learned from the Hunters that she apparently went off to become a mercenary, but there's no paper trail. That means you've got to be unconventional.
You knock on some doors and make some phone calls. You eventually find someone at one of the private military contractors (PMC) that have a recruiting office in London who seems to recognize Maddy. Sandline International is an established mercenary company, incorporated in the Bahamas for tax (and legal) purposes in the 1990s. The London desk does recognize Madeline. With some leaning, he looks up her record. "Killed in action," he says. "Maverick attack in south Germany just after the end of the occupation. Incinerated." He isn't authorized to tell you much more than that, though he does mention that the entire unit was wiped out "to the last man" with similar thoroughness.
Knowing the approximate time and location of the incident, you can probably ask Prismatic Spider to pull up Repliforce records of the skermish. Repliforce is pretty good at keeping these records, but in the chaos of the fall of Maverick Berlin a lot of things weren't properly investigated. To save you a step: he finds records from Sandline International that verify the battle occurred, list the dead -- and among them is Madeline Stafford. Photo IDs show that the Madeline you know and that Madeline are identical. Additionally, pictures of some of the other soldiers involved will show that some of them were at Castle Simionescu during the brawl. Perhaps Nebula has been on a recruiting drive.
So what do you get out of all this?
Madeline started out as a basically good-hearted girl, the youngest of three. Her father was involved with James Houseman IV, which ultimately led to his apparent doom. She rebelled against him for a long time, and then found herself feeling guilty for her bad behavior after her death. She was publically humiliated and her family ruined. She turned her life around, graduated from college, liquidated all of her things and apparently became a mercenary. After some point, she apparently deserted or was removed from her company and brought into the service of Nebula.
You know more about her after a few days of dedicated sleuthing than her own family does. But the question remains: /Who/ is Madeline Stafford? More pressingly, /why/ is Madeline Stafford the way she is?
MySpace
Some people are happy that, for about an hour on the 7th of January, 2220, Madeline's Myspace goes down. The Internet somehow feels improved during that hour. When it comes back up, it has -- believe it or not -- actually gotten worse.
She has learned to wield epic virtual pain. Not only does it still has scrollbars at maximum resolution, but she has apparently learned how to add layers onto the presentation to divide the same real estate into three total pages. The main layer is where most people end up going and still has that terrifying slowly rotating 360 degree of London from the Millenium Eye. However, each layer has a slightly out of sync version of this background. If you don't very carefully go from one layer to another, they crash together and become a surreal 3D blurred urban hellscape. Somebody in the human population will die as a result of the seizure given by viewing this page. Do not view this page drunk.
Madeline still has her old picture; the classic 'holding the camera at myself' picture on her page. She's wearing small, silver hoop earrings and pale pink lipstick. She also uses eggshell blue eyeshadow, though perhaps a little too much. From what you can see in the picture, she was wearing an orange and white t-shirt with an unusual circular purple, green and white logo over the chest, almost like a small stained glass window. Ruddy sleeves extend out from the end of the t-shirt sleeves, hugging her arms more closely. The picture was apparently taken in a bathroom.
In her profile box, Maddy has set herself as a female, 25 years old, from London ENGLAND. She logs in multiple times a day.
About Me: "call me madd, queen madd if you're nasty, lol." Who I'd Like To Meet: "oliver cromwell -- f*** kings!"
Maddy has reshuffled her top eight. Daryn's Myspace is the first, followed by the official Order and Chaos page, then Count Elek, Dr. Regal and Chloe. The last three are bands that Daryn likes and turned Maddy onto. Bands are fighting wars to try to get into these last three spots.
Maddy's interests include: <3 Daryn <3, fighting THE MAN, punching pigs IN THE FACE and anarky in the u.k. Her heroes include Oliver Cromwell, Dr. Regal (!), a variety of girl-power popular figures, and Daryn. She is in a few girl-power type groups as well as many anarchy-related groups that have a lot of yelling in them. Her personal standing in many of these groups have been boosted considerably recently due to her more active involvement with Mr. Luna.
Her details show that she's In A Relationship/TAKEN!!!, here for Everything, Straight, with a hometown of London, White, and an Aries. She smokes and drinks, got a BA in Business from Cambridge, and has an occupation of ANARCHY.
Maddy always has new comments on her page, along with links to numerous loud, clashing video files done improperly so they start firing as you load the page. Her previous friends really dig the new page and congratulate her a lot on her new relationship. Thousands of people are asking her for friend adds, having been lemminged in from the reciprocal link from Daryn's Myspace. Even Maddy is having trouble keeping up and has posted a note about going as quickly as she can so not to hurt anyone's feelings.
Since her first layer is usually full with comments from noobs, Maddy uses the next layer down as a "Maddy and Daryn" Myspace page. The infamous Maddy blog has been moved there and is in the usual lazy typing that Maddy and a lot of other Myspace users use. If you are looking for any sort of useful intelligence, you're pretty much out of luck. It's mostly Maddy talking about inane daily activities with Daryn or writing poetry about learning to forgive one's self. This is somehow one of the most popular features of the page and gets the most comments from regular readers.
Also on the second layer is spillover music from Daryn's page. When he ran out of room, Maddy used space on her page to try to give the bands Daryn likes more exposure. She tries to say something nice about each band, which is making her popular with fans. Bands now actively court her to listen to their music and review it, giving her a bizarre amount of power in the hardcore metal scene that she clearly does not entirely understand.
Since she /has/ three layers to work with, the entire third layer has been set aside for Maddy's fetishistic fascination with Batman/V type vigilantes who "fight the man". This section has several movie clips, especially of V for Vendetta's most recent remake (2218). Added to this are many videos of Daryn getting into fights with "the bad guys" (read: people who are not Robot Masters) directly embedded from Youtube.
Sightings
- Maddy was with Daryn, Dr. Regal, Elek, and Chloe at P:RICK.
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