Rorschach

Rorschach

Name; Rorschach
Former Name; Walter Kovacs
Age; 45isch
Gender; Male
Parents; "Charlie" x Sylvia Kovacs
Siblings; None

Type; Old Test-Subject
Mutation; Future Sight

History;
Rorschach's real name is Walter Joseph Kovacs; born in March 21, 1940. He never met his father, only knowing him by the name of Charlie, and all he had ever been told was that he and his mother would argue about politics and other matters; his father liked President Truman while his mother didn't. His mother, Sylvia Joanna Kovacs, was a prostitute who abused him for interfering with her business. In one incident, possibly at the age of ten (or younger), Walter heard his mother having sex with an unidentified man and had mistook it for her being abused. As he entered the room, the man became angry and left only five dollars, far less than she anticipated. In her rage, she began to beat Walter, calling him an 'ugly little bastard' and telling him that she should have listened to everybody and had an abortion.

In the July of 1951, at the age of 10, Walter went to get something from the store for his mother. He was stopped by two older boys who were making fun of his mother, calling her a whore, and then calling him 'whoreson'. One of the boys picked up a piece of fruit and smashed it in his face. The other, joking that he had some sort of disease, told him to pull his pants down so they could give him an examination. Walter snatched the cigarette from the bully's mouth and then put it out in his eye, then tackled the other, viciously tugging his hair and clawing and biting his face. The people near on the street pulled him off, referring to his wildness as that of a mad dog. The first boy attacked had been partially blinded. When questioned about the incident, Walter refused to talk about his motivation for attacking the boys, leaving others to presume the assault was unprovoked.

Due to this event, the circumstances of Walter's life at home were investigated and it was revealed that he had been regularly beaten and exposed to the worst excesses of a prostitute's lifestyle, thus it was decided for him to be put under state care. He was admitted to the Lillian Charlton Home for Problem Children[1] in New Jersey. During this time it was noted that Walter did very well at schoolwork, excelling particularly in the fields of literature and religious education, also he possessed impressive skill in the areas of gymnastics and amateur boxing.

At the age of eleven he wrote an essay on the subject My Parents. In which he barely mentions his mother, only discussing the absence of his father and who he thinks his father was. Due to his mother's explanation that they argued about President Truman, Walter fantasized an exaggeration to his father's admiration, thinking that his father was a sort of aide to the president, and probably out of the country during the war on a type of mission. He believed his father to be a man of justice, perhaps an ideal model for his own beliefs, and explained that his father might have been killed by Nazis, which would explain why he had never found his son. Walter went on to say how he liked President Truman and thought that by dropping the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki he had saved millions of lives, because had he not done so, many more people would have died from war.

On May 27, 1953, while thirteen, Walter told one of the employees about a nightmare he suffered and they wrote a transcription of the verbal recounting. He describes that a man was with his mom and they were eating stuff like raw dough. His mother choked on a piece and the man tried to fish it out of her throat. He told Walter to get a doctor and he looked but realized there was no doctor in his home. When walking down one of the hallways he saw the man and his mom dancing without clothes on. When he got nearer he saw that they were squashed together, joined at the face, chest and stomach. He recalls the way they were blended together and how they started towards him like a crab, and he looked down to see trousers and underwear wrapped around their feet. Then he woke up, explaining that the dream upset him, 'physically'.

During his years at school, Walter's mother never attempted to make contact with him. In 1956 at the age of sixteen, his mother was found in an alleyway in the South Bronx, murdered through the forced ingestion of 'Drano cleaning fluid', killed by her pimp, George Paterson. When the news was broken to Walter, he said just one word: "Good".

Soon after Walter left the Charlton Home, he started living in a series of low-rent apartments. He took up full employment in a menial capacity as an unskilled manual worker within the garment industry. He described to Malcolm Long, "Job bearable but unpleasant. Had to handle female clothing." In 1962 there was a special order for a dress in a new Dr. Manhattan spin-off fabric. He described the customer as a young girl with an Italian name, saying that she thought the dress looked ugly. Rorschach recalls thinking, 'Wrong. Not ugly at all...very, very beautiful.' Since no one had wanted the dress, he believed it was meant for him, so he took it home and learned how to cut it using heated implements to reseal the latex. Soon he became bored and thought the fabric had no use, leaving it in his trunk and forgetting about it.

Two years afterward, in March of 1964, he bought a newspaper and saw 'her' on the front page. He read the name Kitty Genovese and decided that she was the one that ordered the dress, "I'm sure that was the woman's name." Kitty Genovese, in both the Watchmen reality and our world had been raped and tortured outside of her apartment building while her neighbors just watched, not calling the police. Because of this Kovacs learned what people were behind all the evasions and self-deception. Being ashamed for humanity, he took the remains of her unwanted dress and made a face he claimed that he "...could bear to look at in the mirror."

Wearing his 'new face', Kovacs decided to become a masked adventurer by the name of 'Rorschach', taken from Hermann Rorschach, who created the Rorschach inkblot test. Continuing his work in the garment factory, Walter started his nocturnal lifestyle by fighting crime. The next year, 1965, he partnered with fellow costumed vigilante, Nite Owl, whose technical skills and resources complemented his own skills as an investigator. Rorschach's grappling hook was designed and built for him by Nite Owl.

The next year, April 1966, Nelson Gardner, otherwise known as Captain Metropolis, the same man to begin the Minutemen, attempted to form a new group of superheroes called the Crimebusters. When discussing the group's creation, Rorschach added that a group that size seemed more like a 'publicity exercise', and was "too big and unwieldy." Rorschach was one of the seven vigilantes to attend, though Metropolis retired shortly after and the Crimebusters were built of the six that remained, including his partner Nite Owl, Comedian, Doctor Manhattan, Ozymandias and Silk Spectre.

Rorschach's signature at each crime scene was a piece of paper with ink displayed in an odd pattern on one side, then folded in half, and smeared to both symmetrically. For a long time Rorschach described himself as 'soft', "Soft on scum. Too young to know any better. Molly-coddled them. Let them live." His pattern continued until 1975, when Blair Roche, six years old, was kidnapped because Gerald Anthony Grice thought she had been connected to the Roche Chemical fortune. Roche's father was a bus driver and the family was not in any way wealthy. Rorschach had "personal reasons," for taking the case and he intervened, promising the parents he'd return her unharmed. He visited underworld bars, putting fourteen people in the hospital needlessly, but the fifteenth gave him an address to an unused dressmaker's shop in Brooklyn.

He arrived at the unlit building at dusk while Grice was out. He checked the backyard and saw two attack dogs, German Shepherds named Fred and Barney, fighting over a knob of bone. He went in through the front door and examined the house. The furnace had a piece of children's clothing. One of the cabinets was filled with meat hacking utensils and in the kitchen was a large cutting slab with thick cuts graved into it. He peered out the window, out at the dogs, and looked at the bone they were still fighting over. It was a femur, a human bone. He went into the yard and cut one dog's head open with a meat cleaver. It was at that moment, when he closed his eyes and opened them again, that he claimed to no longer be Walter Kovacs; he was now Rorschach. Then he used the meat cleaver to kill the other dog.

His informant told him the man using the premises was named Gerald Anthony Grice, who was out drinking when he entered, and wouldn't return until ten forty-five that night. When he walked into the house, Rorschach threw the bloody corpse of one of the dogs at him through the window. As he backed up, the other was thrown through the window behind him, knocking him to the ground. Rorschach grabbed him and handcuffed him to the furnace while he screamed "Y-you can't prove anything. I mean, wh-where's the evidence? You can't do anything to..." Rorschach leaves a hacksaw by his hand, "...me." He then starts to pour kerosene throughout the house and pulls out a match, "Shouldn't bother trying to saw through hand-cuffs. Never make it in time." He dropped the match and stood outside, watching the house burn to the ground for an hour, "Nobody got out."

After the incident, Rorschach quit his job as a garment worker. In 1977 the Keene Act was passed, outlawing costumed vigilantes and demanding their retirements. Enraged and defiant, he answered by leaving the corpse of the notorious multiple rapist Harvey Charles Furniss in front of a police stationed with a note pinned to his chest, reading "Never!" True to his word, Rorschach continued fighting crime in open defiance of the law, living in a slum owned by his landlady, Dolores Shairp, without any source of income. During the day, he could be seen walking around the streets of New York without his face or costume as a vagrant with a sign that reads "The end is nigh."

Deemed to dangerous to be kept walking free, the authorities started a man hunt on Rorschach, which resulted in him being taken capture in 1985, at the age of 45. He was sentenced to death, only to be 'saved' by a mad scientist planning to do tests on him. The state granted the wish of the scientist and released Rorschach to him. He implemented a virus in the body of the vigilante, which made it possible for him to survive the nearly two thousand years that he was kept on ice. In that time the war started and the facility Rorschach was kept in was the only place left to live.

As soon as he was released from his ice-capsule, new tests were done on him. This resulted in Rorschach being able to predict the future, be it only for a matter of seconds, sometimes a small minute. This makes him a great fighter, how can you beat someone who already knows what you're going to do?
At the time, he is still figuring out what actually happened to the world he knew, and tries to keep up his vigilante work.