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[personalcorkscrew]

Player Info

Name: Bethany
Age: 28
Contact: booknerdguru @plurk
Characters Already in Teleios: Stiles Stilinski, Darcy Lewis, Leo Roth
Reserve: teleios-mods.dreamwidth.org/1551.html

Character Basics:

Character Name: Merritt McKinney
Journal: personalcorkscrew 
Age: 37(ish) 
Fandom: Now You See Me
Canon Point: The end of the movie, before the mid-credits scene
Debt:

Class A:  4
Class B:  12
Class C:  20128

•  

GRAND TOTAL: 1687 years, 4 months 

Canon Character Section:

History:
Like all the characters in the movie, we don't have any huge amount of information about Merritt's background. We know a little more about him than we do the others – that he has a brother and was hugely successful for a number of years. That his brother stole all his money and left him holding the bag when the IRS audit came and he suddenly found himself paying back taxes and slogging his way back up into the limelight. With that in mind, canon and headcanon were blended to fill in the gaps where they were found.

**

This is a story that you've heard before.

A boy, gifted with strange and wonderful powers goes out and attempts to help people with his gift. Revealing truth where he sees it, bringing hope to people when and where he can.

And then it all goes wrong.

Merritt McKinney was born in Iowa. He has one brother and that's enough. His parents weren't great, but they were better than some, he was fed and clothed and his mother tried, at least, to give him and his brother some kind of manners and moral compass. She was a good woman who didn't deserve the man who married her. There's not a lot there for him to tell more than that. They didn't have her that long anyways. His brother was always the central person in his life, older by about four years, and he looked up to him like all little brothers look up to their older brothers.

The less said about their father the better, Merritt prefers not to think on him at all.

He and his brother left Iowa behind as soon as they could get away with it – there was nothing for them there. Especially not after the plant closed and there was nothing keeping them safe from the fists of their father.

His brother was the only person who he'd told about his powers, and it was 300 miles away from home and down to the last dollar they had in their pockets before his brother got a bright idea.

That they were going to use Merritt's abilities to help people. And that was how the great Merritt McKinney got his start. Because his brother had a great idea and appealed to Merritt's inner desires to help people. Because sometimes people just need a little nudge in the right direction to be happy and making people happy is the best way you can spend your life. So his mother had said on occasion.

From the get-go, Merritt had impressed and horrified people with his ability to read people and be right consistently. Sometimes this worked in their favor, sometimes it got them beaten out of towns if people didn't like some of the things that Merritt had revealed.

His brother had told him that they would charge the people a fee for Merritt's sessions, but at a fair price, just so that the brothers had something to live on and buy food with. Because Merritt can't help people if he dies from starvation.

It wasn't until they hit a suburb outside of St. Louis that they were in a community center where one of the bigger businessmen in the area saw them. He was impressed and sponsored Merritt's first big show. And then from there, it was just like every other hallmark special that ever airs. In fact, it did air in the second tv special that was all about how a little kid from a hick town grows up to do magic on the big stage. Granted the script that he and his brother had worked out for that special was significantly edited to downplay certain aspects of their childhood, but it wasn't outright lies. That was the important thing, that they not lie.

Telling the truth was important to Merritt and his credibility as a performer - if the people coming to him could not believe they would hear the truth from him, then he wouldn't ever hit it big. His brother was in it for the money, that was easily understood. They didn't come from much and it was a nice lifestyle once you got a taste for it. For Merritt, it slowly became less about helping people and more about what he could do and how far he could push himself and his skills. He kept trying to one-up himself, reading and learning more about the fields of mentalism and hypnotism. Most of what he's done has been relying on his natural talents, but studying gives him even more tools at his disposal.

He gets better and bigger and more refined with his skills and his control. Hypnotizing people over the phone as an example, where all he has is his voice and the power of suggestion – not something that someone in his line of work would necessarily attempt to do.

It wasn't until halfway through the second big U.S. tour that Merritt woke up one morning to find out that his entire world had imploded when he wasn't looking. And when it's all said and done, there's a year that he spends in jail because of IRS and they take pretty much everything else they can get him for. His brother was smart about moving the money around and into almost untraceable accounts overseas. To this day, he has no idea where his brother has gone off to.

After prison, it took him a long time to be comfortable again with doing magic and being out and around people. A cautionary tale for other magicians and performers. So he goes back to the streets and working his skills there. Reaching back into his roots and while he does shake down people, he's always careful to pick ones that can afford it and who need a good nudge.

It's during one of these that he gets recruited into the Horseman by way of a tarot card being left for him. It's the Hermit, which speaks to both his age and his abilities and plays into his ideas of just being someone who can shine light on the path to enlightenment for others.

It takes him a while before he truly realizes why he was selected. He makes a good counterbalance to Daniel's laser focus and poor people skills. He's someone else there who can do what needs to be done, but not always in nearly such a flashy way (he has his moments though – Agent Fuller was a ridiculously easy mark). He can make Henley laugh, encourage Jack, and they all come together to make something that's so much bigger than them.

He also doesn't look like a teenager and that makes certain things easier (impersonating a Parisian police official for one and then renting a car for another) and being around all of them for a year, he can see exactly what was lacking between his brother and him on the road and him being on the road with these three magicians.

He has a moment where he doubts. In the apartment as they are getting rid of all the evidence or attempting to, at least. He does not want to go back to prison, not for anything in the world, does he want to go back.

But his fellow Horsemen pull him out of it and they go on to perform an amazing show that leads them to a fascinating ending at the tree where it all began.

Personality:

On the stage, Merritt is an excellent showman. He's got an engaging and charming stage presence that sets you right at ease and gives you the feeling that he's one of your very best friends. That he's completely trustworthy, that you've known him all your life, and that he's totally on the side of the angels here. It's part of what's made him as popular as he was because he had the showmanship as well as the actual talent for reading people.

Off the stage, Merritt is much quieter and more introverted. He keeps his hands to himself unless it's someone he knows and trusts. Because of his brother, he tends to touch the people he regards as family and friends a little more often, casually and almost reflexively even, just to check in and make sure that he won't be taken unawares like that again.

He enjoys reading, it's one of the few things that prison was good for – the time he got to spend reading anything he could get his hands on. It's also quiet. Books don't actively think back at you or cloud the air with unresolved feelings. They also give him a useful excuse for staying still and quiet in a corner for hours on end so that he can recharge whatever mental and emotional batteries he needs to.

He's able to switch between the two side of his personality fairly seamlessly after years of practice at it. It's not perfect, but it's hard to notice unless you spend a great deal of time with him.

He has a loose sort of code of ethics that he goes by, especially after the time he spent in prison. He learned some useful stuff while in there about protecting yourself and keeping a fairly low profile. As well as there being more than one way to solve an issue.

He and Dylan share the same distaste for people taking advantage of other people. Merritt also has no tolerance for infidelity due to some of the things he's witnessed in his past, and that's seen in the way he works with the married couple in the cafe at the beginning of the movie. And while blackmailing and modifying memories isn't exactly a good guy thing to do, ensuring that the husband won't be able to cheat on his wife with her sister anymore is part of that trade-off. He gets money and the satisfaction that he's fixed a problem for someone and spared them some future heartbreak. Or so he hopes.

Powers/Abilities:

Merritt self-identifies as a mentalist. However, there's a lot packed into what he refers to as mentalism, and the line between what is and isn't magic is blurry to him.

For his non-magical skills, he's got the observation, deduction, and induction skillset that you'd expect someone in his profession to have. They are useful fallbacks when he's got a divided focus or he's exhausted himself.

For the more magical part of his skillset, it's broken down into the different ways he receives his information. Whether it's words or memories or just feelings that he's reading off people or objects.

Mind Reading: he's actually able to sneak into people's heads and pull thoughts out. Anything other than surface thoughts might take a little more effort on his part, but he's also highly practiced at suggestions that will bring what he wants up to the surface.

Telepathy: He's also very good at pushing thoughts at people and using his telepathy to impose his will on them. This is mostly how he's able to get the woman at the beginning to be unable to move as he scans her husband. Though the divided focus takes a little more out of him than he normally expends, but that's why he's honed some of the casual mentalism skills that are less about magic and more about paying attention to all the details and making very quick educated guesses.

Empathy: He's able to not only sense emotions, but also influence them. He refers to it as nudging them here or there as he needs them to go. He can also project emotions out at people, which 99% of the time is his projecting calm at Danny because for fuck's sake, kid, you are going to stress yourself into a stroke.

Hypnotism/Siren Song: There's the power of suggestion and then there's the extra little oomph that Merritt's capable of putting into his words. It doesn't always happen consciously on his part and it's how he could hypnotize someone over the phone with just his voice. When it's for more than one person, a physical touch can help anchor it, which is why you see him touching some of the people he's hypnotizing.


In Teleios:
Since Merritt is currently there for the Fourth Wall event, he's got all his powers with him and he's fine, he's cool, the place is weird, but he can deal. When he wakes up with the bracelet on and it's completely silent in his head, it is going to freak him out. He's never not had all the stuff in his head before so it's going to throw him for a loop. Luckily, he's got 2 of the horsemen and Dylan there to help him through it, as well as the bar down at the pool for all his alcoholic needs.




Appearance:

Samples:

Actionspam Sample:

Here

Prose Sample:

Here