Forty-Four Jim

Forty-Four Jim is a powerful trader of Nuclearth, leading the largest trade consortium of North America. He calls home the city of Alpena, on the shore of Lake Huron, but he's rarely actually there, spending his time traveling on business all over the continent.

Origins of Name

Forty-Four Jim is well enough known that people have generated many stories about the origins of his unusual name. Some people claim it's because he was born in the forty-fourth state, others that it's the caliber of his favorite gun. The former is demonstrably untrue—the forty-fourth state was Wyoming; Jim was born in Nebraska, the thirty-seventh state—and the latter is unlikely; while skilled with firearms, Jim has never shown a preference for a particular caliber, and if anything has most often been seen with a .357 Colt Python.

Jim's own explanation of his name is that he got it from his forty-four-inch waistline. If this is true, he's lost some weight since then; while he's still definitely on the stocky side, his waist now doesn't exceed forty inches.

Description

Forty-Four Jim is a fairly large man, both in height and in girth. He has slightly squinty but friendly eyes, above a round nose, and his dark hair is usually kept short and neatly combed. Jim dresses in brown business-suits and ties, many of the latter custom-made out of the salvaged rags of preapocalyptic clothing and other textile goods scavenged from the Burning Lands. He walks with an easy, rolling swagger.

Jim speaks with a slight Southern accent, which is a bit misleading as he neither was brought up in the South nor makes his home there now, and while he's certainly passed through the South many times on his mercantile peregrinations, he's spent no more time there than he has in other parts of the continent. He has a habit, though, of picking up a bit of the local accent wherever he goes, and for whatever reason when he traveled through the South and picked up a bit of the accent there, it stuck.

History

Forty-Four Jim grew up on a farm in Nebraska. He wasn't called Forty-Four Jim then; that's a name he didn't acquire till later. In those days, he was known as "Strongarm Jim" for his skill in arm-wrestling—an avocation he still enjoys to some degree, though he's let himself go enough that he's not as good at it now as he used to be. (He's still good enough to be willing to place the occasional bet on his victory, however.)

Strongarm Jim was never really content with farm life, and always wanted to see the world. Trading seemed to him to be the best way to make a living doing that, and he set off while still in his early teens to pursue a life as a trader. He didn't have much starting out, or in fact anything but the clothes on his back and the few personal items he could carry with him—his parents opposed his desires, and refused to give him anything to support himself with, in the hopes that he would be unable to establish himself and quickly return to the farm. He managed to make enough with some odd jobs, however, to buy some goods to trade, and by one means or another managed to do well enough to get by.

He didn't do much better than that, however, until falling in with a more experienced trader named Gray Willis. Willis was impressed by the fact that a boy Jim's age could support himself at all, and more impressed when he found out with how little Jim had started. He took the boy under his wing, taught him more of the trade, and eventually sent him out to do some of Willis's business on his own. Eventually, when Jim had made enough working for Willis to start a healthy business of his own, he took his grateful leave of his mentor and set off, heading north to establish his own territory and avoid competition with the older man. By the time Willis died a few years later, Jim was already wealthy enough on his own that the money Willis left him, while a fair piece of his fortune, was only a little gravy on top of what Jim already had.

But by that time Jim was thinking he could be even more successful if he had other people working for him, much as he had worked for Willis but on a more formal and long-term basis. He decided he'd learned enough that he could do better now taking a less active role, training younger traders and having them do the legwork for him while he acted in an advisory capacity. What Jim ended up founding wasn't the first trade consortium in post-war North America, but it ended up becoming the most successful.

Relations

Jim never married, but has had relationships with any number of women, and has a number of illegitimate children scattered all over the continent. The nine offspring he knows about, he supports munificently, and visits frequently. Inevitably, this has led many women to try to take advantage of them, claiming that he slept with them and

Unusually for powerful people of North America, Forty-Four Jim doesn't consider himself a member of any fraternity. He has good relations with the Rileys, but stops short of actually claiming membership, though there are many who say that he's a Riley in all but name. He also has particularly good relationship with the Librarians, the more so since he's often donated money to fund the research projects of various Librarian groups.

Personality

Forty-four Jim is a boisterous man with a big voice and a big personality, who loudly proclaims that he'll try anything once, and who almost means it. He's free with his money, when it comes to legitimate expenses; he has little use for beggars, but is willing to spend a good amount for quality goods and services, and is a generous tipper. A man of passions, Forty-Four Jim enjoys good food, good women, and good conversation, and has a breadth of learning that often surprises people who mistake his genial, easygoing manner for ignorance.

An eclectic man, Forty-Four Jim has ?a particular taste for boating, and what little time he does spend at his "home" in Alpena is largely spent on his boat in the lake. He often talks of expanding his operations to Neptunia and the other flotillas of the oceans, to give himself an excuse to spend more time at sea, but he has yet to actually do so... perhaps because it would mean more time away from the relationships he's already established in North America, and he doesn't want to spread himself too thin.