With some people, it's easy to see the hard life they've lived. Experience is written on Kai's face in the form of sun-baked skin and faint lines. It would look rugged on him, were it not for the dark circles that sometimes droop below blue eyes, or the uneven nature of his dark stubble. He has dark hair in need of a trim, a strong, but refined nose and bowed lips. He's very tall at over six foot and shows evidence of an athletic build, which seems at odds with the signs of a hard life.
He wears a dark blue dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up and the collar open. He wears a watch on his right wrist and a pair of blue jeans. Most often he wears a pair of hiking sandals.
Kai is a Vegas boy, born and bred. His mother was a casino bartender and waitress and his father was in and out of the picture his whole life. As a kid, he got into trouble and racked up a few minor juvenile offenses. A guidance counselor at his school suggested that the boy could do with a hobby. He started going to a local circus school run by some of the performers on the strip. It kept him distracted, and he turned out to be a fair dancer. He started picking up magic tricks from one of the instructors.
He started dreaming about a career as a dancer. He was fairly good - good enough to end up in the chorus of a few revues his last two years of high school. But then he hit an awkward growth spurt. He grew too tall, too broad-shouldered and gangly. It threw off his coordination and his rhythm. He was barely competing before, but after the growth spurts, he lost all competitive edge. He went to audition after audition, but he wasn't lithe and streamlined enough.
It was a very confusing time for Kai. His father had swept back into his life and was trying to break up his mother and her new boyfriend. He was struggling with his own sexuality, as well as the dashed dreams of becoming a dancer. He went out and managed to get drunk, despite being under-aged. He got into a brawl in the lobby of a casino with a former friend who had just gotten hired on to a job he had coveted. The pit boss recognized him and realized he was drunk. He knew Kai's mother. So he handcuffed him to a chair in his office and went to call his mother. Even in his drunken state, he seemed to intuitively know how to get himself out of the cuffs. With a series of precise movements, he manipulated the locking mechanism with only a few shakes and shimmies. The cuff fell open. Kai took off and eventually ended up back home. His mother had a fit at him. He slept off the alcohol and woke the next morning, a handcuff still attached to one wrist. Vague flashes of the night before made him try the little shimmy trick again. The second cuff popped open.
Thus began Kai's second dream of becoming a Vegas magician. He apprenticed under a master magician who had a ten-year standing gig at a small casino just off the strip. He dedicated himself to the craft of magic. His mentor learned quickly not to ask too many questions about Kai's ability to break seemingly any lock. He was challenged, invigorated and had the time on stage that he had always craved. Within a few years, he had established himself as a talented young magician. But no matter how hard he worked on other tricks, nothing impressed more than his escapology. His glory days lasted about five years. He got a headlining show at a three-star on the strip. He was even featured in a TV special. He came to terms with his sexuality and even had a few moderately successful relationships.
Then something happened. It started getting too easy. Kai started getting bored. He tried to expand his skills into illusion and close-up magic, but all anyone ever wanted to see was him escaping some improbable bonds. His father entered into the picture again and begged for money. He started coming late, half-assing or skipping his shows. He went through a messy break-up. All of this led to drinking and flirting with drug abuse. Within a year, the casino had cancelled his contract and cut him loose.
It wasn't any one thing that started Kai's downward spiral. A whole lot of things went wrong for him all at once. As it often does with drugs, one addiction led to another. He owed bad people money. He started stealing and using his ability to crack locks and safes to pay for his habits. It was his mother and a few close friends that dragged him out of the pit. His father disappeared, this time for good. He got himself off the hard drugs and settled in to the more socially-acceptable vices of cigarettes and alcohol. But his time on the downward spiral had cost him. He had racked up debts to some dangerous men. Despite his desire to clean up his act, those favours are still being called in. He's known just as much in the criminal community as a thief and a con as he is to the general Vegas community as a formerly-promising young magician. Here's to the losers, as Sinatra once sang.
Magic: Kai apprenticed with a master magician for a number of years. He's skilled at illusion and coin-tricks, though his big strength was escapology. When he's on his game, he also has a strong stage-presence and has expert patter. At the top of his game, he was a very entertaining magician. He is also very bodily aware, double-jointed and ambidextrous. Some of those skills are carry-overs from his aborted training as a dancer (see next skill) but he's kept it up.
Dance: Once upon a time, Kai trained to be a dancer. He spent his youth mastering movement, contortion and choreography. Then he hit a growth spurt and he suddenly no longer had a dancer's build. It still brings him joy though, and he does still dance when no one is watching.
Thievery: As a by-product of his fall from grace, Kai became an accomplished thief. Aided by his natural charm and his ability to pick locks, he became almost as accomplished a crook as he was a magician. And in Vegas, there are no shortage of pockets to pick or cash to be made by a man with light fingers and a charming smile.
Fighting: Kai went to a tough school, grew up around the glitz of Las Vegas and got into trouble from a young age. He can hold his own in a fist fight. It's one advantage to not having the build of a dancer.
Shooting: Kai knows very well how to use a firearm. He's a decent shot and was taught how to use one when he was 14 by his mother after a particularly disturbing visit by his father.
Kai's ability is a form of mechanical intuition. Except, instead of being very good at repairing cars or other forms of machinery, or being some kind of an inventor, he's an expert at picking locks and jamming things up. He can, with only a few precise movements, jiggle a standard pair of handcuffs free. He can simply jiggle a padlock and have it release, and can just touch a combination lock and know what series of numbers to enter. More advanced locking mechanisms will take more time and/or some kind of device to aid him (such as a hairpin) but given enough time, he can crack any kind of mechanical lock. The limit to this is electronics. The moment computer chips come into play, he's at a loss. He can't break electronic keypads, but he can open standard-lock doors and deadbolts with a touch. The moment moving parts are no longer central to the locking mechanism, he's stymied.
Kai's focus has been almost entirely on picking various types of locks, but it can be applied to more than that. He can, for instance, hot-wire a car with a touch (unless it has a computer-operated starter.) He can also jam a gun and kill an engine by jiggling a vital part out of place. All of this requires physical contact with the object he's trying to manipulate. He could, technically, become a brilliant inventor, but that would require an engineering degree to make any real use of. He can MacGuyver together simple objects somewhat instinctively, or make minor repairs (such as seeking out what might be stopping an engine from functioning) but he doesn't have enough of the underlying science in his brain to make good use of any of that. It's instinct, and instinct can only carry him so far. Still, he has a natural aptitude with anything that has moving parts and some kind of mechanism. The only things he's built with any success are illusion rigs for his act.
Kai dressed for the stage.
