I want to get off Alfie Solomons' Wild Ride

Are you over 18?
Yes
Is your character 15 years old or older?
Yes

Pen Name
Iddy
Contact Method
A PM to ihdreniel @ plurk, an email to ZieglerFan719 (at) gmail (dot) com, or a PM to devoutish @ dreamwidth; whatever works best for you guys.
Current Characters
None, but I'm also applying for Callisto from Xena: Warrior Princess.

Personal Frequency Number
28469
Network User Name
ASolomons

Given Name
Alfie Solomons
Canon
Peaky Blinders
Canon Point
post-3x06, "Episode Six"

Background
Alfie's wiki page is not very canonblind-friendly, and parts of it contain some weird spots of random fanfic headcanon to boot, so I'm just going to write up my own summary!

Alfie is the son of a Russian refugee mother who fled the pogroms of the late 19th century, and a (presumably) English father; theirs is a powerful crime family, and he's the current head of a Jewish gang in 1920s London. Their primary income comes from illegal bookmaking at horse-racing tracks, but they also make and sell rum illegally to disreputable businesses, and offer protection from other gangs to those who pay them. By his first appearance on the show, his gang is at war with a rival Italian gang, and they're losing - largely because Alfie doesn't trust the police and refuses to pay them off in exchange for their protection, something that the Italian gang leader, Darby Sabini, has no qualms about doing. Things are further strained because of racial tension - Sabini commonly makes anti-Semitic comments about Alfie and his men, and Alfie's own stories about being brutal towards at least one Italian soldier while serving in the first world war likely don't help things, either.

This is the climate that Tommy Shelby, a Birmingham gang leader, steps into. When he and his men stage an attack against Sabini's gang that Alfie takes notice of, Alfie invites Tommy to come over for a talk. Tommy frankly informs Alfie that he needs help if he wants to win his gang war, and offers to ally their two gangs together. Though initially dismissive of the idea - especially since Tommy wants to start paying off members of the police force - Alfie eventually comes around. But despite their alliance, they very much remain two separate and distinct gangs, and Alfie clearly expects his to remain top dog. When Tommy and his men start becoming too autonomous, taking over clubs and making moves without Alfie's prior permission, Alfie and Sabini arrange a secret meeting to discuss the situation. They agree to broker a truce between the Italians and the Jews in order to take down the Birmingham gang; in addition, it's agreed that Alfie's bookmakers will be allowed to operate on the racetracks that Sabini controls.

While pretending to still be on their side, Alfie invites two of the Birmingham gang members - one of them Tommy's older brother, Arthur - over to his warehouse to celebrate a traditional Passover Seder. He tells them the story behind Passover, and announces that it's tradition to sacrifice a goat in representation of killing the Egyptian pharaoh who had enslaved the Jewish people - a man who had, in Alfie's words, "pushed [his] fucking luck". He informs the Birmingham gang members that this year, he's named the sacrificial goat Tommy Shelby - and immediately, the Jewish gang attacks, followed quickly by the Italians bursting in to help. One of the Birmingham members ends up shot to death, while Arthur is framed for his murder and hauled away by Sabini-allied police. However, this alliance ends up being even shorter than Alfie's original alliance with the Birmingham gang: Sabini breaks his promise to allow Alfie's bookies back on the racetracks, and tensions flare up once more. Tommy shows up at Alfie's place again, Alfie arranges the release of Arthur from prison, and after a tense negotiation of terms (and more than a few very serious death threats), they agree to renew their alliance against the Italians.

A couple of years later (there's generally a two-year timeskip between seasons), Tommy taps Alfie for help again, wanting to have him pose as a jeweler to help him gain access to a treasure vault owned by exiled Russian royalty. Alfie agrees, and everything appears to go off without a hitch - though later on he ends up double-crossing Tommy again, selling information that he'd learned during the caper to an enemy group. Said group also takes Tommy's toddler son for ransom, which Alfie hadn’t known would happen - though when Tommy rages at him for "crossing a line", that doesn't stop him from temporarily pretending that he had known, in order to make the point that Tommy shouldn’t get to participate in gang warfare while at the same time expecting him and his to be off-limits. (He admits the truth after a few minutes, though, and Tommy tells him that he’d known from the beginning, because Alfie hadn’t put on a good enough poker face to hide his regret when he’d found out.) His canonpoint will be shortly after this event.

Personality
As his background shows, Alfie Solomons is not someone to be trifled with. He's very involved in the gang lifestyle and in criminal activities in general, and he's both capable of and willing to use violence to accomplish his goals whenever he deems it necessary. He's not lawless, but he very much follows his own set of rules, and he doesn't much care if the rest of the world disagrees with his judgements of what is and isn't acceptable. Really, he's as much a businessman as he is a criminal (albeit a businessman who might pull a gun on you while you're meeting with him). He's intelligent and very perceptive, reading people and situations with ease. He's a seasoned negotiator, he has an actual office where he does actual crime-related paperwork, and his gang has a lawyer on retainer. His wars are fought with words and deals as much as they're fought with guns on the streets. Despite this, he has no illusions about what he is. He's completely unapologetic about his criminality, and is openly disdainful of gangsters who he sees as hypocritical - once, for example, lambasting a man for harming other gang families while seemingly expecting his own family to be off-limits.

Alfie's default state seems to be somewhat gruff, but he's certainly capable of being charming and polite when he wants to be, and he'll sometimes use that to his advantage when he has an ulterior motive - once, when greeting a man who he’s planning to frame for murder, he’s even downright sociable, all smiles and shoulder-pats and smalltalk. And he can change on a dime, too - he'll go seamlessly from congenial to sinister (or the other way around) in no time flat, and neither one seems false in him. It's easy to mistake him for being capricious, but he actually isn't: when he's in Big-Time Gang Leader mode, every move, every word, and every change in tone or mood is carefully calculated and chosen to try to elicit the type of reaction he's looking for. When he puts his poker face on and goes tight-lipped, it's extremely hard to guess what he's really thinking, and he likes it that way. When he goes off on a rambling tangent or acts strange and eccentric, it takes people off-guard, putting him solidly in control. He'll yell at people sometimes, or even physically attack them, but it’s always very methodical and deliberate - he actually has an incredibly good handle on his emotions. When he shows his anger, it's usually because he wants to - to intimidate, or to punish, or to gain the upper hand - and rarely because he genuinely loses his temper. Interestingly, when he's just making threats of violence, he'll usually do it very casually - he says "I'm going to shoot you in the face" in the same tone that most people say "I'm going to have you over for tea". He also tends to be rougher with his own allies (including his underlings in his gang, when they displease him) than he does with his enemies or with mere acquaintances, because he has higher expectations of them and depends on them more. Alfie being harsh with somebody is a sign that he's invested in them to some extent, and that they're not someone he's willing to simply scoff at and walk away from. All in all, his preferred role is something of a chessmaster type, doing his best to carefully arrange both people and situations in a way that will work to his favor. Still, he's mature and experienced enough to know that he can't expect to control everything, and when a plan of his fails (due to an unforeseen variable, or simply a miscalculation on his part) he's able to roll with it and adjust accordingly.

One of Alfie's stand-out traits is how remarkably clearheaded he is about... well, basically everything. This is not to say that he's always right, because he definitely isn't, but he's very good at avoiding psychological pitfalls like self-deception and hypocrisy, and he delights in pointing them out in others. He knows exactly what he is - a man who breaks the law, and who occasionally hurts and tortures other people - and he makes no excuses or apologies for this. He's also stubborn to a fault when it comes to his own beliefs and standards; for instance, he doesn't like or trust law enforcement, and so he flat-out refuses to pay them off and work with them the way all the other gangs do, even though his own gang clearly suffers as a result (he does let Tommy do it on his behalf while they're temporarily allied, but that seems to be as far as his willingness to compromise will go). It's also worth noting that Alfie is quite Jewish both religiously and culturally. He somehow manages to reconcile his faith with his gang activity, and it's something that he takes seriously. He celebrates the holidays, donates a lot of his ill-gotten money to Jewish charities that help the elderly and infirm, and he clearly feels a strong sense of connection with his people, both with regards to his ancestral ties and with those he knows in the present day. He would be very aware of the fact that nobody in the game setting is really his - he didn't grow up with them, they're not a part of his community (meeting other Jewish PCs would be nice for him, but they still wouldn't be a replacement for anyone from Camden Town), and they don't share the same history or blood. That said, if he develops close CR, he may still subconsciously apply intra-gang dynamics to them, and the gangs of Peaky Blinders have a definite air of looking out for their own. As much as they're willing to break their alliances with other gangs (Alfie in particular does this near-constantly, to the point that his yo-yoing loyalties are something of a fandom joke), relations within a gang are generally quite loyal, and the family and loved ones of members are looked after. Alfie has the potential to be a formidable enemy or an unpredictable, ultimately untrustworthy ally - but still, given the right circumstances (meaning, if he were actually genuine about it, and in it for the long haul as opposed to just forming an alliance of convenience), he wouldn't necessarily be a bad person for someone to have at their side.

It can be difficult to say how Alfie would interact with people who aren't gang-related. As mentioned, he doesn't like or trust the police, but we never really see how he is with regular citizens - those who aren't criminals, and who aren't law enforcement - in the show. However, all the gangs that have been shown (Alfie's included) seem to typically work with and target each other rather than civilians. Those who get caught in the crossfire are usually people or businesses who have allied themselves - either overtly or tangentially - with one gang or the other, rather than those who are completely unconnected to the criminal underworld. Therefore, in a game environment, I think he'd be pretty unlikely to try to harm anyone who sincerely just wanted to go about surviving and solving the mystery of the town without running into any trouble: after all, he too will be interested in survival and in finding a way to go home, and he'll have a lot of incentive to play nice. But anyone who he might earmark as involved in something similar to his line of work, even just by virtue of who and what they are (generally fellow criminals and shady people, for the most part), would be fair game for trickery, manipulation, and general mistreatment, as would anyone who made a point of investigating or trying to stop any of the misdeeds he might get up to. Survival and escape will be his top concern, and he'll never prioritize troublemaking over either of them, but old habits will still die hard.

TL;DR for the app's Google form:

- He's confident without being arrogant, and extremely self-assured. He's also fantastically stubborn about sticking to his own principles, even to his own detriment or the detriment of those around him.

- He's very clear-eyed, unhypocritical, and honest to himself (if not always to others). He really enjoys pointing out the flaws of people who don't share these traits, because he's also an infuriating asshole.

- He's very capable of maiming, murder, and other sorts of violence, but even though his idea of who deserves his violence might not match up with, you know, actual laws, he's not the type to go around hurting random people for shits and giggles.

- He a schemer, he likes being in charge, and he'll likely try to manage the people around him - though in a more subtle, underhanded way than simply declaring himself the Leader of Everything and expecting everyone to fall in and follow his orders. He's also experienced enough to know that absolute control is a fool's game, and is used to working with and adjusting to wild cards, unforeseen circumstances, unexpected variables, etc.

- He's capable of playing nice and working with others in pursuit of a shared goal, though he also has no qualms about turning on former allies should he decide that their goals no longer align.

CRAU
N/A

Supernatural Powers
N/A

Natural Abilities
Intelligent and street-smart, confident, adaptable, generally level-headed, practiced with guns (though he's from the 1920s, and would have to adjust to any non-contemporary weaponry).

Inventory
His revolver, his pince-nez, his walking cane.

Imperative Inventory
No items are absolutely imperative for him, but I do want to note that he comes with a whole host of health issues! He struggles with sciatic nerve pain, and while he's perfectly capable of functioning without the cane, he walks easier with it than without; likewise, the pince-nez glasses make reading easier, but with some squinting he can get by without them. He also has lung cancer, and though at his canonpoint it's still undiagnosed, he does show mild symptoms (facial skin lesions, the occasional bad cough).

The following are samples
Their Worst Fear
Complete lack of control. I'm talking about something much deeper than simply dealing with unfamiliarity, or with situations where he isn't in charge of every variable - he's very used to both of those things. But pure and utter helplessness, an inability to do anything substantive to work with a bad situation, or - worst of all - an inability to control himself? Noooooope.

3 Important Survival Tips
- Do careful reconnaissance.
- Know when to trust, and when not to.
- Don't lose your head.

Third person sample
An early log from a previous game! The canonpoint here was slightly further back, but not enough to make a difference in characterization.