Lloyd Henreid (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
babyfacedkiller) wrote2019-12-11 10:03 pm
babyfacedkiller) wrote2019-12-11 10:03 pm
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User Name/Nick: Mania
User DW: n/a
AIM/IM: n/a
E-mail: fantasticpantz@gmail.com
Other Characters: n/a
Character Name: Lloyd Henreid
Series: Stephen King's The Stand
Age: Not stated, but he's described as young and baby-faced. So let's say mid to late twenties.
From When?: After the big Vegasplosion.
Inmate/Warden: Inmate. Lloyd is a petty criminal who, following a spectacularly ill-advised killspree, went on to win the lucrative gig of being second in command to the post-apocalyptic devil/antichrist. Pretty impressive rap sheet, right? But while he has committed his plus-sized share of nasty things, Lloyd is no monster and no psychopath. Amazingly, he's not even that bad a guy. What he is is a small-timer who allows bigger, badder guys to make decisions for him. He needs to learn to take responsibility for his actions, start making his own hard choices, and maybe finally figure out that riding shotgun through life isn't the best idea, especially when the devil's at the wheel.
Abilities/Powers: Nothing special, but he could kick ass at the gross challenges on Fear Factor.
Personality:
The Devil's Right Hand. That's a job that requires some serious credentials. It's gotta be someone dangerous, right? A real baaad guy. Ruthless, devious, a bit of a psycho. You probably already have a picture drawn in your head. Maybe he's got a big scar on his face, a sharp suit, a murderous glint in his eyes. Maybe he's even sporting a tail or a forked tongue, if you're the literal type. Now erase that image and picture an idiot. There you go. Now we can start talking about Lloyd Henreid.
It takes a special kind of person to stumble onto a killing spree, but that's Lloyd for you. Irresponsible, purposeless, devil-may-care and not terribly bright, Lloyd possesses a miraculous talent for getting from deep shit into even deeper shit. And you'd be forgiven for assuming that his list of talents begins and ends there. Between his naive brand of ignorance and his inability to grasp the consequences of his actions until they smack him right in the face, Lloyd bears more resemblance to a kid playing at cops and robbers than to a true hardened criminal. He's got a flexible, easily influenced nature and his approach to life is purely circumstantial; he's content to ride the tide as it comes in and follow someone else's lead, rather than do something radical like try and think for himself.
But that's the old Lloyd. Before the superflu wiped out 99% of the world's population, before he was abandoned to starve in his maximum security prison cell, and before a grinning, darkly charming fellow by the name of Randall Flagg came along and made him his right-hand man.
Lloyd has had some very rapid and painful growing up to do. He's always been the type to learn his lessons the hard way, and it doesn't get much harder than being trapped in a box of concrete, abandoned by the world and forced to feed on rats, roaches and worse to survive. The apocalypse is no picnic, especially for world-class morons, but in a surprising show of resilience, Lloyd has proven to be a survivor. Well, with a little help from his new demonic friend, of course. Incarcerated men sometimes find Jesus, but it was the devil who found Lloyd. Randall Flagg offered him more than just freedom, a sandwich and a cushy job. He offered Lloyd a kind of rebirth. The chance to become someone new.
The man who emerged from the Phoenix jail is not the same guy who went in there with a goofy swagger and an idiot grin. Couldn't be. There was no place for idiots in Flagg's new world, especially at the top. So from the mindless troublemaker, a guy who once couldn't think more than five minutes ahead, Lloyd has turned into a pretty capable troubleshooter. This new-and-improved Lloyd is more mature, more responsible, a little wiser. The reckless, cartoonish idiocy has been carved out of him, leaving him with a level-headed, if weary and cynical grasp on reality.
It's in Las Vegas, as Flagg's second-in-command, that Lloyd finally got a chance to shine. For the first time in his life, he was in a place where he didn't only belong, but mattered. It turned out there was something he was good at -- running a post-apocalyptic city. Pretty crazy, right? But maybe it's not so crazy. Lloyd believed that it was Flagg who made him smarter, but the more likely explanation is that Lloyd has always had the potential to do something better with himself, but never knew. It's not as if he became Stephen Hawking overnight, after all. He got better at thinking things over because he actually had things to think over for a change, and genuine responsibilities to deal with. And his scattered memory became much less of a problem once he learned to keep shit organized. But the real key to his success were his people skills. If Lloyd has one true talent, it's his ability to get along with most people when he puts his mind to it, from your average Janes and Joes to psychotic demons. He is something of a natural diplomat: affable, chatty and approachable without being a pushover, and damn good at making friends. That very quality even made an increasingly paranoid Flagg consider arranging an accident for him. Lloyd had too many "asshole buddies" in high places, and that made him a threat.
Not that Lloyd has ever seen himself as any kind of threat to Flagg. We all know how the story goes, right? The more things change, the more they stay the same. For all that he's changed, Lloyd has stayed fundamentally the same; despite being the second most powerful person in Vegas, he's remained a lackey, still following a path not his own, and one leading towards a very literal dead end.
It's no great surprise, that Lloyd has remained a loyal follower of Flagg's even as it became clear that things wouldn't end well for Vegas, and it wasn't just fear that's caused him to stick with his frankly lousy boss. Lloyd ain't, as the song goes, no fortunate one. He's been dealt some shitty cards in life. Mostly twos and threes. He has known neglect, disdain and casual disregard since he was a kid. Positive reinforcement, not so much. Nobody has ever expected a goddamn thing from him, himself included, and he has come to internalize this view of himself as a dumb, good-for-nothing lowlife. At times it made his life easier -- it sure made it easy to sidestep responsibility for the bad things he did, 'cause hell, what can you expect from a born loser like Lloyd? It's not like he knows any better. But it's also made Lloyd resentful of authority, left him feeling disenfranchised and alienated from a world that's never given a damn about him. It was Flagg who gave Lloyd what he'd always been deprived of -- respect. And once he got a taste of it, the idea of going back to being a nobody ex-con just didn't appeal. Flagg found him at his lowest and gave him the chance to become something greater. It's not a debt that Lloyd will soon forget.
So really, between Lloyd's fierce loyalty, his low self-esteem and his surprising competence, you've got the ingredients for a perfect right-hand man. What more could an evil overlord ask for? Except, well, there is one thing that might prevent Lloyd from winning henchman of the year, and it's that he isn't really all that evil.
While he's hardly overburdened with conscience, Lloyd has never had a taste for blood, either. It's a funny thing to say about a man whose picture appeared in the papers with the subtitle of "unrepentant, baby-faced killer", but it's true. Lloyd isn't at his core a violent guy. He can lash out when he feels threatened or cornered, but that's more out of habit than who he actually is. He isn't ruthless or cold-blooded, he isn't cruel and he isn't even much of an asshole, unless you catch him on a bad day. He's capable of compassion and kindness and he tries, as much as he can, to be loyal to his friends. Even working for Flagg, a job that required the routine overseeing of crucifixions and the occasional burning of mutilated bodies, Lloyd hasn't been able to shed his humanity entirely. He has managed to push aside his distaste for the less pleasant aspects of his work, to rationalize away a lot of the bad shit -- it's a tough old world, after all -- but cognitive dissonance can only carry you so far. It's been slowly chipping away at him, and it has left him badly scarred.
Lloyd has seen too much, done too much, been through too goddamn much. Too much pain and suffering and death. And he's real tired of it all. As good as he is at evading responsibility, he can't escape the nightmares. It's all tangled up for him, the guilt over the horrible shit he's done, the trauma of having been left to die and the anger at the people who would do that to him. Lloyd may be the sanest of the Vegas leadership, but he is still deeply messed up, holding inside a volatile, poisonous cocktail of emotions that he has no idea how to deal with, because he'd much rather just avoid thinking about it altogether. The final straw came when he was ordered by Flagg to shoot Glen Bateman, an elderly sociologist with a big mouth. Lloyd did the deed, but something in him broke. It's not a stretch to assume that had he not perished in a nuclear explosion soon after, he would have ended up either dead inside or putting a gun to his own head, sooner or later.
So where does that leave us with Lloyd? Neither here nor there, really. From a criminal without a clue, he's graduated into a henchman with Cassandra Syndrome, able to see things going south, but lacking the willpower and the conviction to do anything about it. He is nowhere near as bad as you'd expect from a person with his rap sheet, but he has done his share of terrible things, and they don't hand out prizes for basic decency (oh, they do? my bad). There are several ways you can see Lloyd: a spineless loser, a man with an admirable sense of loyalty, or maybe just a guy stuck between a rock and a hard place, somebody who never truly had a chance at a happy ending. One thing it's hard not to see him as, though, is a wasted opportunity. He could have been the man to save Las Vegas from Flagg, to prevent even more bloodshed, but he has remained, to the bitter end, Flagg's most disillusioned yet most loyal follower. After all, Flagg didn't lie to him. Lloyd got a pretty classic devil's deal - the chance to be somebody, however briefly, at the cost of his soul. But what the hell, it's not like it was worth much to begin with.
...Right?
Barge Reactions: After several months of working for Randall Flagg, Lloyd is no stranger to weird shit. Which isn't to say he won't be both freaked and weirded out by a space prison/afterlife and its resident superheroes, movie monsters and talking animals, but he'll deal. Rolling with the punches is sorta his speciality, so the haphazard nature of Barge life shouldn't bug him that much, and the experience of being a small fish in an aquarium full of piranhas and sharks isn't all that new to him either. It's the prison aspect that will be harder for him to swallow, because while he'll more or less accept that he's earned his stay, it will still be a nasty reminder of his time in Phoenix. The fact that it looks nothing like a prison will help take the edge off, as well as the blurred line between inmates and wardens. An encounter with a certain kind of warden might still go awry, but overall, he'll try to stay out of trouble.
Try being the operative word.
Path to Redemption: Lloyd is unlikely to be a high maintenance sort of inmate. He's already got one boss, so he doesn't need his warden to tell him what to do. Honestly, just being there for him and giving a damn would go a long way. An overly judgemental attitude isn't likely to go over well -- better to approach him from a place of sympathy and understanding -- but there's no need to treat him with kid gloves, either. He's a big boy even if he doesn't always act that way, and he should be treated like a grown-up and held accountable for his actions. It's better to expect too much from Lloyd than too little. A warden should be willing to push and challenge him to better himself, to use his empathy, his brain and his leadership skills. Just not necessarily all at once -- I mean, Jesus Christ, he's not a juggler.
Of course, being a trial and error kinda guy, Lloyd will inevitably fuck up, and when that happens, it's far better to go with creative and constructive punishment or even a well-placed "I'm disappoint" over a brute force approach to discipline. Putting him in Zero, for instance, would be a terrible, no good, very bad idea, considering how his last stay behind bars went. It's also important to be as fair as possible with him, because his previous experience with authority has left something to be desired. He expects the system to be corrupt and uncaring and he expects to be treated like dirt if not outright abused, so he'll be sensitive to what he perceives as injustice on the part of the wardens. His warden should at least be willing to hear his side of the story, talk things over, and stop it from sliding into resentment. Lloyd should actually be encouraged to question and be critical of authority, but he also needs to let go of the Us vs. Them mentality and embrace a more nuanced view of things. He's come to see himself as a perpetual underdog, and it might not hurt to remind him that in Las Vegas, he was no such thing. He may not have personally abused the power he had, but he did participate in a system where people got crucified for minor offenses and where the very idea of justice was a joke. So if he's going to concern himself with injustice, he may want to take it a step further and actually do something about it when he's in a position to.
There's his loyalty to Flagg to tackle, and that's not going to be easy. It's important to understand that it's not a case of starry-eyed, blind loyalty we're talking about. Lloyd is hardly Flagg's number one fan; he knows Flagg is a monster, and not even a particularly successful monster at that. Lloyd's loyalty is built on practical and sadly solid foundations. Aside from gratitude and fear, both of which are justified and impossible to get rid of entirely, there's also the fact that whatever sense of self-respect Lloyd has comes from his association with Flagg. He has resigned himself to the notion that being Flagg's right-hand man is as good as it's ever gonna get for him. He needs to be convinced that he can be worth something independently from Flagg, and since his pre-Flagg life seems to make the opposite case, this will take time.
Before he can really move forward, Lloyd will need to be glued back together. He's pretty deeply traumatized. He has trouble sleeping, he showers compulsively several times a day for half-hour stretches, and he sometimes prefers to drink himself into a stupor than deal with the nightmares. Therapy might not be a bad idea, but even just having somebody to talk to about all the bad shit would help. Eventually, he is going to have to confront his past, including that one real unfortunate kill spree, because as much as he'd love to forget all about it, it will keep haunting him until he acknowledges what he's done and finds a way to deal with it. Lloyd's never going to be perfectly at peace, but he can come to terms with himself, accept that he has done fucked up things and has had fucked up things happen to him, and in spite of that he can move on, he can know and he can do better.
Now, Lloyd isn't going to slip on a pair of tights and become a boy scout hero any time in the near or far future. Despite being caught in a battle between good and evil, those big abstract concepts mean exactly squat to him. What it's going to come down to is the people he cares about and his ability to envision a better future for himself. The key to his redemption, if that's what you wanna call it, lies back in Vegas. He could just be a decent guy in some new place far away from his old life, and getting him there would be fairly easy, but Vegas is where he belongs, and where he's most needed. He needs to be able to go back and make the right choice. He needs to be the guy who's capable of standing up to Randall Flagg, and since Lloyd has never really stood up for anything in his life, that's no small thing.
History: Here's a summary of the events of the Stand, and Lloyd's part in it.
Sample Journal Entry:
Never thought I'd say this about a prison, but this place doesn't seem so bad. Weird as all hell, with that up close and personal view of Uranus, but nice enough. In prisons back home, all they ever gave you was a hard time. Here you get a room all to yourself, decent food, and these Star Trek gadgets... [ He tilts the communicator from side to side. Hey, he's from 1990. This might as well be fucking magic. ] I'm just not sure I'm buyin' it, all this talk about getting a second chance.
[ It's his experience that when somebody promises you the world, there's gotta be a catch. A big one. More than likely one that ends up exploding in your face. ]
I know what they say about not lookin' a gift horse in the mouth, but that's not a real smart policy, is it? That's how those Greeks lost their war, not looking a gift horse in the mouth.
I don't know. I guess it just seems a bit too good to be true, that's all.
Sample RP:
"Oh shit we're all fucked!" Lloyd Henreid cried. He put his hands over his head and fell to his knees.
His final thought wasn't anything profound. Only endless, panicked repetition -- oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck fuck fuck fuckfuckfuck -- there was a light so bright it might have burned his corneas right off, he squeezed his eyes shut, and --
Well? Jesus, what the hell was taking so long? Lloyd hoped it wasn't true what they said about your life flashing before your eyes. He didn't want a play by play of his life -- going through it once had been more than he could stomach. But no, there were no flashes of anything. As a matter of fact, nothing at all was happening.
Maybe it was all over.
The silence had changed, he was noticing now, from the charged and terrible final gasp of a city, to... just silence, nothing much special about it. He was still shaking, curled up like a goddamn turtle (in retrospect, trying to shield himself from a nuclear explosion wasn't that bright an idea), but he had no clue what he was scared of anymore. That actually made it scarier. He didn't want to open his eyes. Because if it was over, if he was dead... then he couldn't be anywhere good.
But what was he going to do, just wait around until somebody came and poked him with a pitchfork? And how much worse could it be, anyway, than where he'd been a minute ago? Lloyd waited a few more seconds, then he raised his head and cautiously opened his eyes. At first, everything was blurry, a residual effect of that white light that had nearly blinded him, but once he could see okay, he was greeted by a really nice view of outer space. It looked like something a science nerd would hang up on his wall and masturbate to regularly. Pretty as it was, it made no fucking sense. Lloyd rubbed his eyes with a trembling hand.
"What the fuck," he mumbled, his voice barely scraping out of his throat. This had to be some kind of mistake.
Special Notes: I play Lloyd from the book, not the miniseries. That makes him younger, goofier, kinda more of a mess, and 100% more Sam Rockwell.
User DW: n/a
AIM/IM: n/a
E-mail: fantasticpantz@gmail.com
Other Characters: n/a
Character Name: Lloyd Henreid
Series: Stephen King's The Stand
Age: Not stated, but he's described as young and baby-faced. So let's say mid to late twenties.
From When?: After the big Vegasplosion.
Inmate/Warden: Inmate. Lloyd is a petty criminal who, following a spectacularly ill-advised killspree, went on to win the lucrative gig of being second in command to the post-apocalyptic devil/antichrist. Pretty impressive rap sheet, right? But while he has committed his plus-sized share of nasty things, Lloyd is no monster and no psychopath. Amazingly, he's not even that bad a guy. What he is is a small-timer who allows bigger, badder guys to make decisions for him. He needs to learn to take responsibility for his actions, start making his own hard choices, and maybe finally figure out that riding shotgun through life isn't the best idea, especially when the devil's at the wheel.
Abilities/Powers: Nothing special, but he could kick ass at the gross challenges on Fear Factor.
Personality:
The Devil's Right Hand. That's a job that requires some serious credentials. It's gotta be someone dangerous, right? A real baaad guy. Ruthless, devious, a bit of a psycho. You probably already have a picture drawn in your head. Maybe he's got a big scar on his face, a sharp suit, a murderous glint in his eyes. Maybe he's even sporting a tail or a forked tongue, if you're the literal type. Now erase that image and picture an idiot. There you go. Now we can start talking about Lloyd Henreid.
"You're in deep shit, Sylvester!" Devins exclaimed suddenly.
Lloyd jumped. "What? What the hell do you mean, I'm in deep shit? By the way, I thought you handled ole fatty there real good. He looked mad enough to chew nails and spit out-"
"Listen to me, Sylvester, and listen very carefully."
"My name's not-"
"You don't have the slightest idea how big a jam you're in, Sylvester."
It takes a special kind of person to stumble onto a killing spree, but that's Lloyd for you. Irresponsible, purposeless, devil-may-care and not terribly bright, Lloyd possesses a miraculous talent for getting from deep shit into even deeper shit. And you'd be forgiven for assuming that his list of talents begins and ends there. Between his naive brand of ignorance and his inability to grasp the consequences of his actions until they smack him right in the face, Lloyd bears more resemblance to a kid playing at cops and robbers than to a true hardened criminal. He's got a flexible, easily influenced nature and his approach to life is purely circumstantial; he's content to ride the tide as it comes in and follow someone else's lead, rather than do something radical like try and think for himself.
But that's the old Lloyd. Before the superflu wiped out 99% of the world's population, before he was abandoned to starve in his maximum security prison cell, and before a grinning, darkly charming fellow by the name of Randall Flagg came along and made him his right-hand man.
Lloyd has had some very rapid and painful growing up to do. He's always been the type to learn his lessons the hard way, and it doesn't get much harder than being trapped in a box of concrete, abandoned by the world and forced to feed on rats, roaches and worse to survive. The apocalypse is no picnic, especially for world-class morons, but in a surprising show of resilience, Lloyd has proven to be a survivor. Well, with a little help from his new demonic friend, of course. Incarcerated men sometimes find Jesus, but it was the devil who found Lloyd. Randall Flagg offered him more than just freedom, a sandwich and a cushy job. He offered Lloyd a kind of rebirth. The chance to become someone new.
"I'm going to make you my right-hand man, Lloyd. Going to put you right up there with Saint Peter. When I open this door, I'm going to slip the keys to the kingdom right into your hand. What a deal, right?"
The man who emerged from the Phoenix jail is not the same guy who went in there with a goofy swagger and an idiot grin. Couldn't be. There was no place for idiots in Flagg's new world, especially at the top. So from the mindless troublemaker, a guy who once couldn't think more than five minutes ahead, Lloyd has turned into a pretty capable troubleshooter. This new-and-improved Lloyd is more mature, more responsible, a little wiser. The reckless, cartoonish idiocy has been carved out of him, leaving him with a level-headed, if weary and cynical grasp on reality.
It's in Las Vegas, as Flagg's second-in-command, that Lloyd finally got a chance to shine. For the first time in his life, he was in a place where he didn't only belong, but mattered. It turned out there was something he was good at -- running a post-apocalyptic city. Pretty crazy, right? But maybe it's not so crazy. Lloyd believed that it was Flagg who made him smarter, but the more likely explanation is that Lloyd has always had the potential to do something better with himself, but never knew. It's not as if he became Stephen Hawking overnight, after all. He got better at thinking things over because he actually had things to think over for a change, and genuine responsibilities to deal with. And his scattered memory became much less of a problem once he learned to keep shit organized. But the real key to his success were his people skills. If Lloyd has one true talent, it's his ability to get along with most people when he puts his mind to it, from your average Janes and Joes to psychotic demons. He is something of a natural diplomat: affable, chatty and approachable without being a pushover, and damn good at making friends. That very quality even made an increasingly paranoid Flagg consider arranging an accident for him. Lloyd had too many "asshole buddies" in high places, and that made him a threat.
Not that Lloyd has ever seen himself as any kind of threat to Flagg. We all know how the story goes, right? The more things change, the more they stay the same. For all that he's changed, Lloyd has stayed fundamentally the same; despite being the second most powerful person in Vegas, he's remained a lackey, still following a path not his own, and one leading towards a very literal dead end.
"You're going to stick?"
"To the very end, Whitney. His or mine. I owe him that."
It's no great surprise, that Lloyd has remained a loyal follower of Flagg's even as it became clear that things wouldn't end well for Vegas, and it wasn't just fear that's caused him to stick with his frankly lousy boss. Lloyd ain't, as the song goes, no fortunate one. He's been dealt some shitty cards in life. Mostly twos and threes. He has known neglect, disdain and casual disregard since he was a kid. Positive reinforcement, not so much. Nobody has ever expected a goddamn thing from him, himself included, and he has come to internalize this view of himself as a dumb, good-for-nothing lowlife. At times it made his life easier -- it sure made it easy to sidestep responsibility for the bad things he did, 'cause hell, what can you expect from a born loser like Lloyd? It's not like he knows any better. But it's also made Lloyd resentful of authority, left him feeling disenfranchised and alienated from a world that's never given a damn about him. It was Flagg who gave Lloyd what he'd always been deprived of -- respect. And once he got a taste of it, the idea of going back to being a nobody ex-con just didn't appeal. Flagg found him at his lowest and gave him the chance to become something greater. It's not a debt that Lloyd will soon forget.
So really, between Lloyd's fierce loyalty, his low self-esteem and his surprising competence, you've got the ingredients for a perfect right-hand man. What more could an evil overlord ask for? Except, well, there is one thing that might prevent Lloyd from winning henchman of the year, and it's that he isn't really all that evil.
"Nobody gets hurt," Lloyd said. "That's my toast. Nobody gets hurt."
While he's hardly overburdened with conscience, Lloyd has never had a taste for blood, either. It's a funny thing to say about a man whose picture appeared in the papers with the subtitle of "unrepentant, baby-faced killer", but it's true. Lloyd isn't at his core a violent guy. He can lash out when he feels threatened or cornered, but that's more out of habit than who he actually is. He isn't ruthless or cold-blooded, he isn't cruel and he isn't even much of an asshole, unless you catch him on a bad day. He's capable of compassion and kindness and he tries, as much as he can, to be loyal to his friends. Even working for Flagg, a job that required the routine overseeing of crucifixions and the occasional burning of mutilated bodies, Lloyd hasn't been able to shed his humanity entirely. He has managed to push aside his distaste for the less pleasant aspects of his work, to rationalize away a lot of the bad shit -- it's a tough old world, after all -- but cognitive dissonance can only carry you so far. It's been slowly chipping away at him, and it has left him badly scarred.
Lloyd has seen too much, done too much, been through too goddamn much. Too much pain and suffering and death. And he's real tired of it all. As good as he is at evading responsibility, he can't escape the nightmares. It's all tangled up for him, the guilt over the horrible shit he's done, the trauma of having been left to die and the anger at the people who would do that to him. Lloyd may be the sanest of the Vegas leadership, but he is still deeply messed up, holding inside a volatile, poisonous cocktail of emotions that he has no idea how to deal with, because he'd much rather just avoid thinking about it altogether. The final straw came when he was ordered by Flagg to shoot Glen Bateman, an elderly sociologist with a big mouth. Lloyd did the deed, but something in him broke. It's not a stretch to assume that had he not perished in a nuclear explosion soon after, he would have ended up either dead inside or putting a gun to his own head, sooner or later.
"But he lies. You know he lies."
"He told me more of the truth than anyone else bothered to in my whole lousy life," Lloyd said, and shot Glen three times. Glen was driven backward, twisted and turned like a ragdoll. Blood flew in the dim air. He struck the cot, bounced, and rolled onto the floor. He managed to get up on one elbow.
"It's all right, Mr. Henreid," he whispered. "You don't know any better."
So where does that leave us with Lloyd? Neither here nor there, really. From a criminal without a clue, he's graduated into a henchman with Cassandra Syndrome, able to see things going south, but lacking the willpower and the conviction to do anything about it. He is nowhere near as bad as you'd expect from a person with his rap sheet, but he has done his share of terrible things, and they don't hand out prizes for basic decency (oh, they do? my bad). There are several ways you can see Lloyd: a spineless loser, a man with an admirable sense of loyalty, or maybe just a guy stuck between a rock and a hard place, somebody who never truly had a chance at a happy ending. One thing it's hard not to see him as, though, is a wasted opportunity. He could have been the man to save Las Vegas from Flagg, to prevent even more bloodshed, but he has remained, to the bitter end, Flagg's most disillusioned yet most loyal follower. After all, Flagg didn't lie to him. Lloyd got a pretty classic devil's deal - the chance to be somebody, however briefly, at the cost of his soul. But what the hell, it's not like it was worth much to begin with.
...Right?
Barge Reactions: After several months of working for Randall Flagg, Lloyd is no stranger to weird shit. Which isn't to say he won't be both freaked and weirded out by a space prison/afterlife and its resident superheroes, movie monsters and talking animals, but he'll deal. Rolling with the punches is sorta his speciality, so the haphazard nature of Barge life shouldn't bug him that much, and the experience of being a small fish in an aquarium full of piranhas and sharks isn't all that new to him either. It's the prison aspect that will be harder for him to swallow, because while he'll more or less accept that he's earned his stay, it will still be a nasty reminder of his time in Phoenix. The fact that it looks nothing like a prison will help take the edge off, as well as the blurred line between inmates and wardens. An encounter with a certain kind of warden might still go awry, but overall, he'll try to stay out of trouble.
Try being the operative word.
Path to Redemption: Lloyd is unlikely to be a high maintenance sort of inmate. He's already got one boss, so he doesn't need his warden to tell him what to do. Honestly, just being there for him and giving a damn would go a long way. An overly judgemental attitude isn't likely to go over well -- better to approach him from a place of sympathy and understanding -- but there's no need to treat him with kid gloves, either. He's a big boy even if he doesn't always act that way, and he should be treated like a grown-up and held accountable for his actions. It's better to expect too much from Lloyd than too little. A warden should be willing to push and challenge him to better himself, to use his empathy, his brain and his leadership skills. Just not necessarily all at once -- I mean, Jesus Christ, he's not a juggler.
Of course, being a trial and error kinda guy, Lloyd will inevitably fuck up, and when that happens, it's far better to go with creative and constructive punishment or even a well-placed "I'm disappoint" over a brute force approach to discipline. Putting him in Zero, for instance, would be a terrible, no good, very bad idea, considering how his last stay behind bars went. It's also important to be as fair as possible with him, because his previous experience with authority has left something to be desired. He expects the system to be corrupt and uncaring and he expects to be treated like dirt if not outright abused, so he'll be sensitive to what he perceives as injustice on the part of the wardens. His warden should at least be willing to hear his side of the story, talk things over, and stop it from sliding into resentment. Lloyd should actually be encouraged to question and be critical of authority, but he also needs to let go of the Us vs. Them mentality and embrace a more nuanced view of things. He's come to see himself as a perpetual underdog, and it might not hurt to remind him that in Las Vegas, he was no such thing. He may not have personally abused the power he had, but he did participate in a system where people got crucified for minor offenses and where the very idea of justice was a joke. So if he's going to concern himself with injustice, he may want to take it a step further and actually do something about it when he's in a position to.
There's his loyalty to Flagg to tackle, and that's not going to be easy. It's important to understand that it's not a case of starry-eyed, blind loyalty we're talking about. Lloyd is hardly Flagg's number one fan; he knows Flagg is a monster, and not even a particularly successful monster at that. Lloyd's loyalty is built on practical and sadly solid foundations. Aside from gratitude and fear, both of which are justified and impossible to get rid of entirely, there's also the fact that whatever sense of self-respect Lloyd has comes from his association with Flagg. He has resigned himself to the notion that being Flagg's right-hand man is as good as it's ever gonna get for him. He needs to be convinced that he can be worth something independently from Flagg, and since his pre-Flagg life seems to make the opposite case, this will take time.
Before he can really move forward, Lloyd will need to be glued back together. He's pretty deeply traumatized. He has trouble sleeping, he showers compulsively several times a day for half-hour stretches, and he sometimes prefers to drink himself into a stupor than deal with the nightmares. Therapy might not be a bad idea, but even just having somebody to talk to about all the bad shit would help. Eventually, he is going to have to confront his past, including that one real unfortunate kill spree, because as much as he'd love to forget all about it, it will keep haunting him until he acknowledges what he's done and finds a way to deal with it. Lloyd's never going to be perfectly at peace, but he can come to terms with himself, accept that he has done fucked up things and has had fucked up things happen to him, and in spite of that he can move on, he can know and he can do better.
Now, Lloyd isn't going to slip on a pair of tights and become a boy scout hero any time in the near or far future. Despite being caught in a battle between good and evil, those big abstract concepts mean exactly squat to him. What it's going to come down to is the people he cares about and his ability to envision a better future for himself. The key to his redemption, if that's what you wanna call it, lies back in Vegas. He could just be a decent guy in some new place far away from his old life, and getting him there would be fairly easy, but Vegas is where he belongs, and where he's most needed. He needs to be able to go back and make the right choice. He needs to be the guy who's capable of standing up to Randall Flagg, and since Lloyd has never really stood up for anything in his life, that's no small thing.
History: Here's a summary of the events of the Stand, and Lloyd's part in it.
Sample Journal Entry:
Never thought I'd say this about a prison, but this place doesn't seem so bad. Weird as all hell, with that up close and personal view of Uranus, but nice enough. In prisons back home, all they ever gave you was a hard time. Here you get a room all to yourself, decent food, and these Star Trek gadgets... [ He tilts the communicator from side to side. Hey, he's from 1990. This might as well be fucking magic. ] I'm just not sure I'm buyin' it, all this talk about getting a second chance.
[ It's his experience that when somebody promises you the world, there's gotta be a catch. A big one. More than likely one that ends up exploding in your face. ]
I know what they say about not lookin' a gift horse in the mouth, but that's not a real smart policy, is it? That's how those Greeks lost their war, not looking a gift horse in the mouth.
I don't know. I guess it just seems a bit too good to be true, that's all.
Sample RP:
"Oh shit we're all fucked!" Lloyd Henreid cried. He put his hands over his head and fell to his knees.
His final thought wasn't anything profound. Only endless, panicked repetition -- oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck fuck fuck fuckfuckfuck -- there was a light so bright it might have burned his corneas right off, he squeezed his eyes shut, and --
Well? Jesus, what the hell was taking so long? Lloyd hoped it wasn't true what they said about your life flashing before your eyes. He didn't want a play by play of his life -- going through it once had been more than he could stomach. But no, there were no flashes of anything. As a matter of fact, nothing at all was happening.
Maybe it was all over.
The silence had changed, he was noticing now, from the charged and terrible final gasp of a city, to... just silence, nothing much special about it. He was still shaking, curled up like a goddamn turtle (in retrospect, trying to shield himself from a nuclear explosion wasn't that bright an idea), but he had no clue what he was scared of anymore. That actually made it scarier. He didn't want to open his eyes. Because if it was over, if he was dead... then he couldn't be anywhere good.
But what was he going to do, just wait around until somebody came and poked him with a pitchfork? And how much worse could it be, anyway, than where he'd been a minute ago? Lloyd waited a few more seconds, then he raised his head and cautiously opened his eyes. At first, everything was blurry, a residual effect of that white light that had nearly blinded him, but once he could see okay, he was greeted by a really nice view of outer space. It looked like something a science nerd would hang up on his wall and masturbate to regularly. Pretty as it was, it made no fucking sense. Lloyd rubbed his eyes with a trembling hand.
"What the fuck," he mumbled, his voice barely scraping out of his throat. This had to be some kind of mistake.
Special Notes: I play Lloyd from the book, not the miniseries. That makes him younger, goofier, kinda more of a mess, and 100% more Sam Rockwell.