#novaintro

Born and raised in luxury in Jupiter, his family owned the largest casinos and dabbled in politics at the same time, using both sectors to augment the other and maximise profits for themselves.

He was the only child of his branch, which was the senior branch of the Jupiter Rockefellers, and there were a lot of expectations placed on him when he was pretty young.

Being the heir, he’s been brought into the fold of corrupt business practices pretty young and basically followed suit.

In college, he met James Sullivan and they formed a very mutually satisfying partnership and he basically had the other do his dirty work for him: gathering secrets for blackmail, intimidating potential rivals, and even inciting the younger to murder when a rival politician got too uppity.

There’s also fraud in his list of crimes but I... forgot, okay, it’s a long list as it is.

Basically, they were caught due to a stupid mistake. Long story short: he tried to cut the other loose and it ended up backfiring on him and now he’s here.

a few quick facts about raphael / hephaestus:

Officially, he’s been charged with leading an art ring and everything it entails, including working with theft, distribution, and forgery, among others. Raphael’s real crime is forgery — working endless days and nights on perfect replications of priceless art that the ring stole from the largest museums, estates, and galleries throughout the planets. When he was caught, he refused to give the ring up and declared himself the sole mastermind, and was subsequently charged with every crime involved. 

Raphael has always had an artistic spirit; once upon a time he had been an artist, he had created his own art. It’s almost a decade now since he has created his own art, choosing instead to replicate the work of others. It’s something he’s good at, something that he knows that he’s good at, and he’s free from any chains attached to imparting something so personal to the world. Meticulous with his forgeries, he had gone years without anybody having noticed that they were forgeries at all.

Raphael is vastly social. The worst punishment in the world would be to leave him alone with himself, and he’d survive anywhere as long as there were someone else to hold a conversation with. Raphael loves people, loves a good time, and when he was still free to travel, he always claimed that the spirit of a place is the people who live within it. Now, he slips in and out of groups, chats up whomever, and while some can find the cynicism a little off-putting, it has never stopped him from launching himself onto them anyway.

The most difficult part of Nova is the scarcity of alcohol; some might say it’s a good thing, but Raphael would disagree. The first few weeks were the most hellish in this regard, his body reacting poorly to being deprived. It’s not that he chose to stop, it was that he had to. He will accept alcohol when he can, and is easily bought with a little contraband bottle.