Proximity Muse

Continuing with the character work for my next project.

Mr. Vegas

Mr. Vegas looks his name. He wears designer shades indoors, has expensive, lounge-lizard kinda clothes (complete with alligator/shark skin shoes) and slicked back hair that is just starting to thin to a widow’s peak. He’s slightly overweight as well. Not so much you could call him fat, just enough to give him the look of being soft. A nervous habit is to use the 100% cotton handkerchief in his pocket to mop his sweaty brow.  His fingernails are manicured and he has that orange spray-on tan. He tells loud, bad jokes, and smokes a stinky cigar. His cell phone goes off at the most inappropriate times possible and has Livin’ La Vida Loca as the ring tone.

Mr. Vegas tells the ladies he isn’t married, but thanks to the spray-on tan it’s pretty easy to white ring around his finger where a wedding band should be. In short, Mr. Vegas is a walking, talking cliché of all the things you’d expect from a Vegas douche bag. He should be. He’s spent a lot of time perfecting his act. The bit about not being married might be the only truth he speaks all day.

The truth is that Mr. Vegas is a cheat and a card shark. He’s so obvious that people underestimate him. Mr. Vegas isn’t just counting cards or scuffing the edges of aces with a sandpaper ring, no sir. He’s high tech. It’s not common knowledge, but a few years back, a Japanese company put out a cell phone with camera that was pulled from the market. The camera had all sorts of goodies and filters, and combined in just the right way it literally became the sort of X-ray camera teenage boys have fantasized about for decades.

The jerkwad shades Mr. Vegas wears are a variation on the cell phone. They provide just enough of an X-ray picture to let him see what cards folks are dealt. Obviously he can’t just walk around with his X-ray shades on all the time. Someone would become suspicious sooner or later. That’s where the hankie comes in. Each time he wipes his brow, he is actually turning the X-ray function of the shades on and off. The hankie contains a tiny chip that has a very short transmission range, which communicates with a similar chip in the shades.

Even with the shades, keeping track of multiple opponents’ hands is tough work. To help him out, Mr. Vegas has a toe-tapper counter that transmits to his cell phone. Any time someone has a really good hand, Livin’ La Vida Loca blasts out and he receives a nonsensical text message. The wording of the text message relays hand and opponent to Mr. Vegas.

Mr. Vegas rarely steps out of character around other people, but everyone has a weakness and his is booze. More often than not it’s the free drinks rather than the cards that defeat him.

Meet Mr. Vegas.