Difference between revisions of "Excessive Self-Endangerment Society"

Latest revision as of 11:21, 20 November 2006

Introduction

The Excessive Self-Endangerment Society was originally founded by bored Celdonian colonials in the heyday of the Empire in Rehochipe. Gathering at a discreet but well-furnished gentleman's club in a fashionable district of Bakrata, they competed furiously to exceed each other in tales of deeply unwise derring-do. In its early days, members of the Society were frequently apprehended by Native Police for drunken and trouserless exploits on the exterior of trams, but increasingly such childish exploits were disdained in favour of truly stupid life-endangerment in the surrounding Atelskrust Mountains and the less navigable tributaries of the Krata.

Constantly seeking out new and dramatic ways in which to encourage spectacular quiescience, the Society gradually expanded its membership from an all-Celdonian body to a truly open-doors organisation. By independence, its membership boasted a majority of non-Celdonian Rehochipeans. Since then the body has sought to extend its membership, with an ideal of becoming a truly international organisation. The Confederation of Anarcho-Dandyists (CADs) has been especially noteworthy for providing outstanding members of the Society.

Character Bios

E. Caractacus Vaughan

The current Head of the Society (a purely honorific position) is Elias Caratacus Vaughan, the first non-Celdonian to be admitted to the Society. Although going on seventy-two he is still avowedly 'in fine fettle' and rarely changes clothes between his favourite armchair at the club and scaling insurmountable peaks. Apocryphally famous for refusing to move out of the path of an advancing buffalo stampede until he had completed the trimming of his moustaches, he accredits his robust good health to the rejuvenating power of bruises. Although his primary specialities are mountaineering and cross-country skiing, he has never let complete inexperience in a discipline put him off it.

Jeremy Plunger

While an incisive polymath academic, Jeremy Plunger is generally believed to undertake his expeditions less for intellectual gain than for the opportunity to personally wrestle stupendously dangerous animals. Often accompanied by his twelve-year-old son and cameraman Isaac, the loss of whose arm to an Edile giant weasel at the age of nine was brushed off by Plunger as the price of 'raising a kid weasel savvy'. He is personally responsible for retrieving eighteen unique types of antivenom for the Rehochipean medical service, twelve of which have been subsequently used on him.

Erica Tau

Solipsist athlete Erica Tau famously gave up her position as Rehochipe's sole international heptathlete, dismissing human-imposed rules of sport as 'a degenerate tendency I must eliminate'. Three years later, she gave up the use of any tools she had not made herself. Why she remains a member of the Society is anyone's guess. Voted the Society's prestigious 'least likely to be discouraged by shattered vertebrae' five years running, she makes up in determination what she lacks in social graces... mostly.

Algernon Artemis-Blackstalk

Algernon Artemis-Blackstalk, formerly known as Comrade Sirotov, is notorious throughout East Hackney as the last Hackneyite citizen to be ejected from the country under a century-old law dating from the Great Revolution and revived during the civil war that led to the breakup of Greater Hackney into East and West, the Conduct Unbecoming to a Socialist Society Act, now repealed. He was expelled after a serious of near-fatal workplace incidents proved his inability to co-operate and his chronic disregard for protective equipment, safety procedures and his comrades' limbs and lives in pursuit of his twisted concept of fun.

• He lost a job as a miner after being caught pressing himself against the coalface mere seconds before a blast was due to be triggered, claiming that he wanted to "feel the heavy vibrations."

• He was sacked from his post as a train driver for climbing onto the roof of his cab mid-journey with the apparent intention of leaping from the moving train using the overhead power lines as a cable slide.

• The final straw came when, after being given a last chance as a junior rat-extractor with the Hackney Wick Distillers' Co-Operative, he apparently attempted to walk across a jury-rigged tightrope stretched over a 4,000-litre vat of raw Grand Old Hackney overproof rum (75% ABV), in an advanced state of intoxication and smoking a lit cigar. "Apparently" is the only appropriate word here. No witnesses survive to tell the tale thanks to a mysterious explosion that levelled the walls, blew the roof somewhere into the stratosphere and incinerated all flora for a mile in all directions. The above summary is an approximate reconstruction of events based on Sirotov's ramblings while recovering in hospital shortly after he was plucked, scorched but miraculously intact and still breathing, from the smoking crater and shortly before he was stripped of East Hackney citizenship.

Sirotov promptly renounced his Hackneyite name, styling himself Algernon Artemis-Blackstalk, Rogue, Soldier of Fortune and Freelance Catastrophologist, adopting the CADs as his spiritual home and cultivating a gravity-defying handlebar moustache. A chance meeting with the late Christoph Carmichael while knocking back a few snifters after a unicycle race down the Mortsur Glacier in the Carelids brought him into the arms of the ESES, from which heady height he has never looked back.

Percival St John Cholmondley-Featherstonehaugh

Known affectionately as 'Chummers', Percival St John Cholmondley-Featherstonehaugh is, on first sight, a typical product of CADs' Hearty Fellow Chapel: portly, extravagantly bewhiskered and seemingly unable to complete any sentence without a hearty 'harrumph'. His involvement in ESES, however, runs counter to this impression. No typical Hearty Fellow spends his twilight years hauling his wheezing frame up vertical cliff faces or wrestling with sharks. Indeed, Chummers' notorious lasciviousness hints at Caddish qualities. If even half of the (almost never verifiable) stories he loudly declaims at ESES meets are true then this blustering walrus of a man has done well to make it to middle age.

Kenneth Patrick Donleavy

Ecopoeian ambassador to Omigodtheykilledkenny. Biography can be found here.

External Links

RP thread