Post by Harvey Dent/Two-Face on Jul 22, 2010 8:09:19 GMT
Full Name: Harvey Dent
Alias (if applicable): Two-Face
Birthday: February 15th
Age: 33
Hometown: Gotham City
Appearance: Six feet tall with a muscular frame and broad shoulders, Harvey Dent would strike an imposing figure even without the disfigurement following the acid attack that lent his him criminal moniker of Two-Face.
Harvey's face, like his fractured psyche, is now a nightmare. While one side of his features retain the striking good looks which once saw him nicknamed "Apollo" by the Gotham press, the other is a twisted mass of scar tissue and desiccated skin with a bloodshot, half-blind eye gazing balefully out at the world and a twisted mouth set in a permanent snarl. Discoloured, seared flesh stretches tight over what was once a high cheekbone and firm jaw, throwing the shape of the bones underneath what remains of his skin into sharp relief.
A shock of coarse bone-white hair on the left side of his head, the follicles permanently damaged by the acid which disfigured his face, is swept back from a high, intelligent forehead and contrasts horribly with sleek, dark locks on the right side of his scalp.
His scars extend down to his neck in jagged lines and a spatter pattern of droplets across his chest, while a band of scar tissue across the back of his left hand shows where he vainly tried to shield his face from the attack. Look closely and you may notice a bare patch of unmarked skin on the third finger of his left hand where his wedding ring once sat.
Despite the ruin of his good looks, Harvey is almost always elegantly dressed in the finest tailoring Gotham can supply, although his clothes frequently reflect the jagged halves of his warring personas. While he does on rare occasions indulge Two-Face's passion for the dramatic in split suits or by deliberately distressing the left hand side of his clothes, he is often more subtle in his choice of clothing, selecting instead deliberately mismatched cufflinks, shirts with designs only on the left side of the chest or a tie with a divided pattern.
Personality: Although some psychiatrists have attempted to categorise Harvey's condition as Dissociative Identity Disorder, they accepted quickly that his madness runs far deeper than any conventional diagnosis can explain. Harvey Dent and Two-Face are not two separate beings as much as halves of the same jagged whole. Both are driven, passionate personalities with a thirst to see justice done upon those who deserve it, and both are frighteningly tenacious in their pursuit of their goals - in Two-Face's case, to the point of homicidal mania.
Harvey keeps however to his own twisted code of honour, and insists that he has never broken a promise in his life. While he claims to have no tolerance for hypocrisy or lies, he is often blind to the consequences of his own actions and motivations, and can be more manipulative and unwittingly destructive than he realises. As a former lawyer, Harvey is adept at twisting the words of others and badgering them into compliance or at least acquiescence. It could be argued that Two-Face is actually the more honest of the pair - he always knows exactly how manipulative and cunning he is, and he will cheerfully lie to and deceive even Harvey himself in order to further his own goals.
Despite the failure of his marriage to Gilda Dent, Harvey remains a romantic at heart – although a solitary, introverted and somewhat lonely one. In part because of the ruin of his good looks, he takes love affairs extremely seriously. While he falls in love quickly and often, utterly idolising the object of his affections, few of his relationships last. If he is in a committed relationship his insanity will become more manageable and his mood swings less extreme, but if he feels himself betrayed by his lover, Two-Face's retribution upon anyone he blames for the end of the affair will be sudden, swift and deadly.
Special Abilities: Harvey has no special abilities, but he possesses a calculating, shrewd mind and an encyclopaedic knowledge of criminal law.
Strengths: As one of the most influential crime lords of Gotham, he is wealthy enough to retain a sizeable staff of henchmen and hired thugs willing to follow him down almost any criminal road he chooses. In most cases their fidelity is bought and paid for rather than coming from any personal affection or respect, but he pays well, which guarantees a certain degree of loyalty in Gotham's underworld. Harvey conducts his shady dealings in several warehouses and offices around the city, and holds a stake in the running of many semi-legitimate businesses including the Deuces Wild casino off Crime Alley.
Harvey is a good hand-to-hand fighter and is adept with a wide range of handguns and semi-automatic weaponry. He also has some experience in sharpshooting, having previously taken lessons in marksmanship from the expert assassin known as Deathstroke.
Harvey is intelligent, articulate and highly informed on issues of local politics; both in terms of the workings of local government and of the criminal underground. He also speaks near-fluent Spanish due to his upbringing in a densely populated and racially diverse quarter of Gotham.
Harvey has large, dextrous hands that can quickly strip and reassemble a handgun or carry out the delicate work of rigging explosives without undue danger to himself or others.
Weaknesses: Harvey's greatest weakness is his total dedication to the only law in which he still has faith – the law of chance. When his warring personalities reach a deadlock over a decision, the double-headed Liberty Dollar left to him by his father and which he now carries everywhere rules his actions. Marked and scarred on one side, pristine shining silver on the other, the coin represents the two sides of Harvey Dent's consciousness. When "good heads" wins the toss, he will unquestioningly show mercy to his enemies, perform an act of compassion or even surrender himself to the authorities depending on the context of the toss. When the scarred "bad heads" side is flipped, the violent and cruel Two-Face takes control of Harvey's actions. Bloodshed and vengeance will not be far behind. Although Harvey Dent still retains a passionate desire to see justice done, both sides of his personality will accept the judgment of the coin without question.
NB – at specific points in-game, Harvey's player will use an online interactive coin toss found at www.random.org to decide Harvey's actions.
Partially blind in his left eye, Harvey has poor night vision and skewed depth perception during the hours of darkness. He only drives at night when absolutely necessary - in order to escape the authorities for example - and has crashed more than one car during getaways. His gun skills also suffer if he enters a firefight in a poorly-lit area.
Harvey suffers a form of obsessive compulsive disorder linked to the presence of his talismanic coin, and must keep it with him at all times – or at least within arms' reach when he is sleeping, for example. Without it he cannot make key decisions and will become increasingly confused and desperate or even incapable of any action at all, especially if placed under undue strain or stress. He habitually toys with his coin in moments of repose, idly rolling and flipping it or walking it back and forth across his knuckles in a manner that his associates can find either entertaining or intensely irritating.
History: Harvey Dent is a Gotham native, and was born into a lower-middle class family in Old Gotham. His father Harry was an ex-police officer who retired from the force after being shot and wounded in the line of duty. Turning to drink to cope with the pain of his injuries, unable to afford the medical care he needed and aimless after leaving the force, Harry Dent became a bitter, aggressive and self-pitying man who blamed his superiors at the GCPD for his situation, and soon began to take his frustration out on his wife Mona and son Harvey.
Psychological and physical abuse in the Dent household were common, eventually developing into the playing of a perverse "game" in which Dent senior would flip a coin, promising to spare his son a beating if the coin landed on tails. Only years later did the adult Harvey come to the crushing realisation that the coin was a trick; his father's coin had been a double-headed Liberty Dollar. There had never been a chance for him to win the "game".
Escape for Harvey came in the form of a place at the University of Gotham, where he majored in Political Science and Law. University brought the solitary, unsure young man out of his self-imposed shell, and he quickly became a popular if formidable member of the Gotham U debate team and a Varsity soccer player. Law School followed university, during which time Harvey met and began dating a passionate young art student by the name of Gilda Gold.
Although their busy schedules allowed for little time together at first, the two fell deeply in love and married soon after Harvey qualified as a criminal lawyer and joined the Gotham DA's office. He became known as not only a dedicated prosecutor but a crusader against the corruption that had historically blighted Gotham's legal system – although he made powerful enemies in the Gotham establishment, especially during his time investigating judicial and police corruption at Internal Affairs.
Harvey's rise at the District Attorney's office was unstoppable, culminating in his becoming the youngest-ever DA elected to office in Gotham. Forming an at first uneasy alliance with GCPD Commissioner Jim Gordon, he worked tirelessly to rid Gotham of crime and corruption, eventually developing a firm friendship with not only the police chief but also to Bruce Wayne, the intense and idealistic young heir to the Wayne family fortune.
For a time there seemed no limit to how high Dent might one day have flown; talk in the back rooms of the Gotham courthouse predicted Mayor Dent and even one day a Congressman Dent. Harvey attempted to lay these rumours to rest, insisting that the cause of justice and not political power was his only ambition, although his opponents whispered that this smacked of Caesar ostensibly refusing the crown. Still others murmured there was something else behind Harvey's unwillingness to move into politics… rumours of emotional instability, of stress-related nightmares and ever-more frequent visits to Gotham's top psychiatrists.
Harvey's most high-profile prosecution proved to be his undoing: the trial of Salvatore "Boss" Maroni, head of one of the most powerful crime families in Gotham. Maroni bribed Harvey's own assistant to smuggle a vial of concentrated sulphuric acid into the courtroom, and when Dent began his cross-examination, Maroni flung the contents of the vial into Harvey's face.
Scarred horribly, maddened with pain, half-blinded and facing the ruin of his public service career, the rage and hatred that Harvey had kept locked away for years began to surface. A voice appeared in his head, low and growling at first then more strident. Always the same demand: "Let me out."
Soon the voice began to whisper to him in both his dreams and his waking hours; by turns cajoling, mocking, furious, seductive and demanding. And finally, unstoppable.
"Let me out."
His behaviour became more erratic, his temper flaring into aggression and violence more and more often.
Therapy that resolved nothing. Drugs both prescription and illegal that numbed the physical pain but fogged the brain, giving that horrible, seductive voice ever more space in the dark corners of a fracturing mind.
"Let me out."
Frighteningly extreme mood swings, taking him from affection and tenderness to sneering, bitter despair, sometimes in the course of only minutes.
Fascination with fate, with duality, with the play of light and darkness on the scarred side of his father's old coin.
Chance. Luck. Good heads. Bad heads.
Fascination becomes obsession.
"Let me out."
Nightmares of flipped coins and callused hands and a young boy's pleading sobs.
"Show me the light."
Memories of burning flesh, acid eating its way through skin and hair and muscle alike in terrible searing pain.
"Give me free rein."
Doubt. Questions to himself that can never be answered. Resignation. A fall from faith. The terrible, despairing freedom that comes when all old beliefs are gone and only faith in the simple and self-evident law of chance remains.
"Let me out."
An empty bed, a taxi engine rumbling outside, and Gilda's suitcase in the hall.
"Let me out. Show me the light. Give me free rein."
Finally, when all else of the old life is gone, he wakes up one morning and two men face him in the mirror.
Harvey Dent. Two-Face. Two sides, one coin. Dark and light, inseparable and eternally locked together, struggling with each other and letting only the law of fate decide the outcome of their battle. Good heads – Harvey wins and the light prevails. Bad heads – Two-Face is free, and the passion and vengeance and abandonment to his every hunger holds sway.
Harvey Dent and Two-Face. Two sides. One coin. Forever.
PB:
Hugh Jackman
