Cary Vaughn-Blair
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Out of Character
Vaughn didn't last too long as an official NPC, but for a while Rue only gave him a journal so he could show up in background more, despite the fact she knew more about him than was healthy. (That was in 2006.) Most of this didn't show up on the wiki for a long time, either.
In Character
Specifics
Full Name: Cary Naomhán Vaughn-Blair
Nickname(s): Always called Vaughn. Also VB, sometimes. Doesn't answer to Cary, usually. Unless you're Iz, who also calls him some other things. At the pub they call him Cookie. He also gets to be Carygoo, though possibly never IC.
Species: Human
Birthdate: May 2, 1966
Birthplace: Kirkwall, Orkney, Scotland
Hometown: Kirkwall / Liverpool, UK / London, UK
Currently Resides: 93 Gloucester Road, Kensington & Chelsea, London, UK
Family: Mother, Christabella Vaughn. Father, Cormag Blair. Younger siblings Josephine Vaughn-Blair and Allan Vaughn-Blair, both deceased. Niece, Nicole Glass.
Sexuality: Straight
Relationship Status: Divorced from Bianca Wernher, and currently Isabella Fitzwilliam's plaything
Schooling: Papdale Primary School, Calderstones School, London College
Occupation: Detective Inspector (Kensington via Belgravia), Metropolitan Police
Detailed Information
Physical Description
Once upon a time, he had a lot of shaggy black hair. Now, he's got rather short-cut black hair, but it's still the same black hair. He's tall (almost 6'2") and well-built, without really being stocky (that's his partner). He used to be gangly, when he was younger.
His eyes are brown, and so is his usual jacket.
Personal Information
Vaughn is a lot of things – incredibly sociable isn't one of them. However, "outgoing" is, if you go about it the right way – years of spending time around people who have a tendency to attract attention to you will make you less interested in being at the center of it, though, if you're Vaughn. He is bold and sure of himself, but not all that interested in sharing it. On the other hand, he won't say no to most dares, and is always up to a challenge.
He's nosy, which is partially due to the nature of being an interrogator and a detective. He learned to be nosy. He's stuck with it.
Unfortunately or perhaps fortunately for him, a lot of Vaughn's life and personality in the last decent chunk of time has been influenced by his friends and housemates, which means he acts like a combination of them the same way they do. He also spends too much time at The Rusty Goat, and is developing a love/hate fear and respect of restaurants due to Isabella.
Backstory
When Christabella Vaughn, a rather well-to-do London painter with a sizable trust fund married Scottish fisherman-farmer Cormag Blair in 1963, no one in either family ever thought it would last. They were right. It didn't. It did, however, last long enough for them to have three children and raise them quite a bit first before the marriage's dissolution in 1976. They lived in Kirkwall, in a medium-sized house, and Christabella painted, and Cormag went out on his boat during the fishing season and worked at the library during the rest of the year. The couple named their first child Cary in honor of Cary Grant, both of their favorite actor. Thankfully, they spared him the middle name Grant and picked the equally awkward but for different reasons Naomhán instead. (Young Cary grew up spelling it 'Niven' as often as he could just so no one would butcher it.) Their second son, Allan, born in 1970, got to have the middle name of Grant instead; the middle child, a girl, was named Josephine Amy and born in 1968.
They spent summers and some weekends on North Ronaldsay, an island with a whopping running population of about seventy, to visit their grandparents at the Blair family croft. It was here that Josie, at age four, got attacked by a wild ram who picked her up by her shirtcollar and tried to run off with the little girl – they had to stay an extra few days on the island for her health and Cary got to call in sick from school. To this day the scene sticks to him every time someone mentions sheep.
Cormag and Christabella divorced in 1977, and Christabella moved to Liverpool, taking the children with her. Custody arrangements had it so that every other weekend and on every other school holiday the three of them would take the thirteen hour train ride to Kirkwall, so the three Vaughn-Blair children grew up both very close and very used to traveling. Cormag had to deal with the fact that the voices of his children became more British every day – thankfully they never went as far as to pick up a Scouse accent, most frequently being exposed to their mother. It was while attending Calderstones (from age ten to age sixteen) that Cary stopped being called Cary, and instead became Tall Vaughn, then just Vaughn. (The other siblings attended as well and got other nicknames to differentiate – Allan, at 5'6", was Short Vaughn, and then turned into Blair. Josephine stayed Josie.) He was a reasonably good student, and decided at fourteen for some reason that hasn't been figured out yet that he wanted to become a cop – specifically a detective. Detectives, according to his wise younger siblings, were only things you saw on television, not real people. Detective, according to his mother, wasn't a suitable job for one of her children.
His father, however, encouraged him, and when Vaughn graduated Calderstones shortly after his sixteenth birthday, he attended London College for two years studying law, then entered training at the Met. Life was fairly simple for him as a trainee-rookie, then an officer, and continuing along the line until he got made a detective eight years after his training began. Notably, when he was about twenty (in 1986), he recruited biker Ryan Bertrand as a confidential informant – and helped Bertrand convert to being a member of the gang squad by 1989. They became partners in 1992, when Bertrand became a covert officer. In the middle of 1994, while working on a case, he met Bianca Rheys, a twenty-two year old Oxford student currently interning at a firm (which was probably the firm of John Driscoll's father, George). They hit it off almost instantly, entered into a terrifyingly whirlwind romance, and married in June of that year. Selim, who performed the ceremony, thought that it was rather shocking and also rather ridiculous, but eventually warmed to Vaughn.
They'd met Carlton and Antonia Lindale that same year at Tool's, a restaurant across the street from the station, and once they married, moved in to the twins' townhouse with them.
Here begin the unclear years of adventures in Cairo, where he spent a lot of his time due to having married Bianca. She'd passed the bar in South Africa and England, but in Cairo didn't work as a solicitor; instead, she was an archaeologist's assistant, and Vaughn entered into quite a similar role. There were lots of crazy moments with tomb robbers and things that felt like they were out of an Elizabeth Peters novel. Vaughn actually rather felt like he was in an Elizabeth Peters novel – the Beauregards were happy to tell him that Peters had gotten some of her ideas from their family. He wasn't surprised. Their second season in Cairo, Bertrand came with them, and established an undercover identity as part of Bianca's family. The three of them became the very, very best of friends, and Bertrand moved in to the townhouse with the Blairs and the Lindales. The next year in Cairo, Carlton, who had by then become Bianca's assistant, came along with them and the two of them took the bar exam and established a satellite firm.
1996, though, was bittersweet. 1996 was when Vaughn received a call from his brother and his wife saying that they had Nicole, Josie's little daughter with them – her father had left the almost one-year-old with them and fled. Why had he disappeared? Because Josie had been murdered, presumably by the man who had been stalking her for quite some time. Nobody had ever told Vaughn anyone was stalking his sister. He didn't know she'd been seemingly stranger-raped by the same person more than once. Understandably, he was incredibly angered by the fact nobody had thought to tell him this before, and fell into a combination of depression and investigative fervor, despite the fact it wasn't his case.
Nobody ever found out what happened to Josie. (Well, not until mid-2007, but that's entirely not the point.)
The years blended back into cases and Cairo and insane hijinks; their marriage started to have some problems, Bianca had some affairs, Vaughn had one too, they kept working things out. While in Cairo once, a notable event involving Carlton saving Bertrand's life on calling out a single fact his cover identity should've known happened – Bertrand still gets mocked by all parties involved to this day. Carlton knew Egypt better than Vaughn or Bertrand, though part of this was possibly because of the fact that Carlton was in love with Bianca. The next really notable thing that happened was two deaths at once – right around when he and Bianca had to make the terrible decision that actually bringing their child, a boy they'd already decided to call Brindlsey, into the world was a bad idea after all, Vaughn again got a bad call about a death.
Allan and his wife had died, leaving nine-year-old Nicole with no one else to live with. He traveled too much. He couldn't take her. She ended up in foster care, where Vaughn saw her as often as he could and still has partial custody.
There were many more things and more wacky cases, and the notion that they were living in a film just continued to become stronger.
As their marriage dissolved further, Vaughn and Bianca started divorce proceedings in 2005, and she moved out to her Regents Park apartment. This didn't stop them from still being incredibly close friends, as they still are to this day, and she sometimes even stays in the townhouse. Everything after this point happened in the game, and will eventually get summarized and written down. Yeah.
Backstory: Simplified
Orkney Island boy has parents divorce, turns into part-time Scouse boy instead, without ever picking up a Scouse accent. Spends time in London. Joins police force. Marries crazy Oxford grad after only knowing her two months. Appropriates partner from biker gang. Gets up to all sorts of hell. Currently trying to beat The Killiam Group at their own game in a really distant sort of way when he's not doing his day job or having surprisingly public sexual encounters with the new definition of perfect.
External Links
Vaughn's LJ (unused, and I should make a directory post sometime)
