Lets Make A Twisted Small Town

[ajardoor]

"Jellybean" Sam Carver considers himself the Mozart of professional security. Certainly, his resume is impressive; border patrol, bomb sniffing, body guarding, cover-ups. He works as a body guard and head of security for a wealthy family. He is a grizzled but jovial combat veteran, with fine black suits and sunglasses doing little to hide his finely-honed physique. His age only shows with the greying edges of his pitch black crew cut and the bags around his watery blue eyes. His healthy African-American features and deep friendly voice give the impression of an idealised sculpture come to life.

His dark secret is that he believes several of the town's most powerful citizens are pawns ("Renfields", if you will) of a vampire conspiracy. He plans to hunt down these vampires, and is quietly amassing an arsenal of esoteric weaponry to do it. He has no qualms with eliminating any "Renfields" that may pose a problem.

[ajardoor]

Sally Belltower works at the post office, she is a fanatic for puzzles and riddles. She is a perky, cheerful and motivated worker, but also annoying, judgemental and arrogant. She just got married to the sexiest man in the town, and will gossip shamelessly about her sex life to her co-workers in private.

Three possible secrets (chose whichever one/s you like);

1) She is a psychopath obsessed with proving how smart she is, and wants stupid people to die. Soon, she will start sending bombs and poison traps through the mail, with riddles and puzzles attached to them that, when solved, allow the trap to be defused or cured with an antidote. Think The Jigsaw Killer or The Riddler.

2) She is a pimp, the hidden mastermind behind a prostitute ring. None of the hookers know her identity, but they fear her all the same. They are right to fear her, as she is utterly ruthless.

3) Her husband is dying and so is she. She will do anything to save either of them from death, including turning to supernatural stuff (although she doesn't believe in the supernatural) and trying experimental medicine.

[AlexanderHowl]

The Gray Family is one of the founding families of Serenity Falls, having moved to the area soon after the American Revolution. With four generation living under the same roof of their old mansion on their four square mile estate, they are served by the members of the Alby Family, the Jefferson Family, the Lee Family, and the Yazzie Family, each with their own small grouping of homes near the mansion. With the children growing up together, the children of the Gray Family often marry the children of the servant Families and, after eight generations, it is difficult to find a member of a servant Family who is not a cousin of a member of the Gray Family. However, there is enough marriage between the five families and outsiders to prevent inbreeding.

Secret: The Grays are descended from the basted slave son of the British governed of the island of Jamaica. After raising the other slaves into revolt against his father, he stole away with the treasury and his father's young white wife (his lover), as well as a dozen other co-conspirators and their families. When they arrived in New York, they sold the ship and headed west until they reached Serenity Falls. Since he could pass and was married to a white woman, he became the Gray Family while his co-conspirators and their families became the four servant families. The Gray Family carefully invested the treasury on behalf of the five families over the centuries and, while the Gray Family owns half of the assets, the combined wealth of the five families is over $1 billion.

Dark Secret: The five families practice of form of Obeah that has become twisted over the centuries. Every year, they hire five women to participate in their sexual rituals and to initiate the adolescent members of the family into the secrets of sex for the year, paying them handsomely for their time. At the end of the year, the women are each offered the choice to join one of the five families or to leave the estate with their earnings.

[cptbutton]

Victor Jamison is a brilliant young neurosurgeon. He has privileges at Serenity Falls Community Hospital, but much of his work is out of town.

Victor never realized that "most surgeons think they are God" was supposed to be a joke. He is arrogant and overbearing, and generally thinks he is better and smarter than anyone else.

He is rather short, and sensitive about it. All of the women he gets involved with are taller than average.

The tragic part of his life is that his second wife Sarah is in a coma after a household accident. She is in a local nursing home, and he visits her frequently, and spends a lot of time talking or reading to her.

His devotion to his wife does not include fidelity, he chases women frequently, and has something of a bad reputation among the women of the own.

His secret is that Sarah did not have an accident. He knocked her down the stairs during a fight. He has a long history of abusive behavior, in his relationships and elsewhere, but has always been able to escape any serious consequences of his actions.

[Donny Brook]

Bailey Quick (36) is pretty, friendly and famous as a country music performer who toured widely and had several successful albums. She lives in a large luxuriously converted historic mill on the river bank. She has restored the old water wheels to working order and generates electricity on site. While not reclusive, she does value her privacy. She likes Serenity Falls because most people seem to be unconcerned with celebrity.

She has been absent from the music scene for half a decade and is fading from the public memory, despite a small persistent fan-base who would eat up any performance or recording from her.

Her secret: she is a computer genius and secretly created a leading crypto-currency. Her deeper secret: She is a computer SUPER-genius and malicious hacker with practically unlimited ability to manipulate blockchain algorithms. She was secretly radicalized by a hipster marxist past boyfriend and plans to bring down the world economy in about a decade or so.

[Donny Brook]

Earl Dempsey is 80 years old, and served with distinction in the Marine Corp. He lives in the Serenity Home graduated-care retirement/nursing facility, and is an active writer of letters-to-the-editor of several major newspapers. He also writes to political figures, from local councillors to world leaders, haranguing them with whatever hobby-horses have his attention at the moment.

His secret: He fired the shot that killed JFK.

[ajardoor]

An amnesiac woman of unknown identity is currently being questioned by police and psychiatrists following her coming into the police station a month ago. The woman is in her late twenties, claims truthfully that she doesn't remember anything of her life before she woke up alone in an empty abandoned house, has wild red hair and green eyes, got several weird tattoos on her back, and the police have had no luck tracking down her information (as per Zeroed).

She doesn't like being called "Jane Doe".

Her dark secret is that when she woke up, she found herself covered in blood that wasn't her's (and she had suffered no wounds). She throughly washed the blood off herself and burned her bloody clothes to ash (she came in to the police naked).

[Dr. Beckenstein]

Frederick Hunter is another 90+ year old inhabitant of the Serenity Home. He spend most of his time alone in front of the TV, but from time to time he is visited by his grand - children (most of them are in their 50s now). He is just another quiet old man who waits for his death.

Secret: His real name is Friedrich Jaeger, former SS Obersturmbannführer, mass murderer and war criminal who is still wanted by most of Europe's Governments.

Dark Secret: He was given refuge by the CIA in the 1950s as a favour for informations and "special services". Should this ever come out, it would wreck the reputation of the US Government and sour the relations with a few of their closest allies.

[Dr. Beckenstein]

Another one:

Serenity Shipping is a freight forwarder and carrier that runs a small fleet of trucks (mostly 18 wheelers) that transport freights of all kind throughout North America. it is a respected enterprise of the town and employs about 50 peoples.

Secret: They make their real profits in human trafficking. In many of their trucks, desperate immigrants from Latin America hide behind the freight.

Dark Secret: Many of the female immigrants are simply enslaved and sold into prostitution.

[Dr. Beckenstein]

Question: Who far can we go with this?

Where is the limit? Buffy, X-Files, Picket Fences?