The Duck again. I've been trying to track down this Rufus and having not very much success. It turns out nobody at Rudy's out on Highway 1 has ever heard of him.
Kidding. I do real research sometimes too, but this is a tricky one. All I've found is that Rufus is some kind of ultra elite industrial espionage agent who operates out of Detroit, who moonlights as a photographer of the unusual and the absurd. The word ninja is thrown around a bit, and from what I've heard it seems accurate. I called up Traficant, who's just having a swell time in Southeast Asia, and he sent me the following. Rufus is a good photographer and he's got some strong journalistic mojo. Some of the shots he's taken have been nothing short of amazing. He got both Donald Trump and the Trump bot in one shot, those proving it's existence. He also managed pull out documents and photographic evidence of Project Lazarus, and in fact, has a signed photo of Jimi Hendrix, taking in 1994.
He does work for competing newspapers regularly, and I don't know if his photographic evidence really matches up to the hard work that columnists do. Rufus is very good at showing you something you haven't seen before; but he's not as good at telling you what it means. That's more my stock in trade.
Well professional rivalries aside; that should tell you what you need to know. He's good at getting where other people don't want him to be, and finding things other people don't want us to find. Strikes me he might come in handy.
OK, let's get this done. Johnny Appleseed, he's just this guy, you know?
I think I used that once before, but it fits. This is the Duck, for those who haven't guessed.
He's ex-special forces. I have conflicting reports that put him in the Navy SEALs and the Army Rangers, and I'm not at all sure that it's possible to be in both. At any rate, the more complete records place him in a special unit in the Army Rangers. He's supposed to be involved in small unit combat on every continent (yeah, that includes Antartica).
It might have been in Antartica where it all started to go wrong. Reports on that mission are sketchy, but the mission was authorized by the NSA, and involved sketchy reports of an archeological dig gone wrong. He got back, with 16% of his unit. He retired, or was retired, immediately thereafter and resolutely refuses to talk about his past.
He's very good with many different styles of combat, and he's smart. He's been trained to effectively deal with unusual situations in the field without coming unglued, and whatever his other mental conditions, his mind still retains that ability. His services are available as a mercenary; we've used him, as an independent operator, on a few missions in the Yukon Territory, and he's done very well.
But he is a little off. In particular, he has an unnatural affection for apples (Tayrn has already sent me out to purchase some particularly good hard cider, in case he does join (Now that's the kind of mission I like. It goes without saying that, in order to get the right Cider, I have to have samples). Tayrn thinks it's probably the symbolic aspect of loving a "pure" America and therefore loving Apples as a symbol of that lost purity. Me, I think the guy probably just really likes apples.
Anyway that's him in a nutshell. He'll make a good field agent; particularly if we have to go out in the country or off the beaten path.