| There may be spoilers in the following character descriptions; consider this fair warning. As more important characters appear, their vitals will be posted on this page, so if someone new shows up, check this page. If they're not here, then clearly they're not very important, now, are they?
Banquo is half-Mexican and half-Swedish, and also a colossal dick. How does that happen? Sometimes, when a man and a woman love each other very much, they hug each other in a special way and have a baby. And other times, a man and a woman who are barely acquainted and intensely drunk fumble in a back alley and, nine months later, are blessed with a wiggling reminder of why it can be bad to do that. Banquo’s mother was an actress on the Chicago stage who actively loathed him, but fortunately for him she only had ten years to screw him up—he ran away from home after that, bouncing around the Western territories and learning how to do manly things like steal and receive fellatio. Banquo does not like anyone unless he or she is an attractive woman; given the paucity of such women on the frontier, it thus becomes fairly obvious that he hates everyone. His hatred is very subtle, though, and he is exceptionally charming and manipulative, mostly because it is easier to cheat people that way. The one person who is not an attractive woman that he does not hate is Colin, and that is mostly because Colin confuses him too much for standard hate to apply. Though Banquo is perfectly capable of killing people, and has done it lots of times, he tries to avoid it for convenience's sake. Still, some folks just need killing, so he does oblige when the situation requires it.
There’s a quote somewhere in Dostoyevsky about fresh-faced academics who debate and debate and debate radical philosophy without bothering to do anything else about it. Colin is not one of those people. Yes, he is fresh-faced, and yes, he was an academic before traveling to Colorado, and yes, he is a committed Marxist who translated his own copy of the Manifesto because the few English-language versions extant at the time were not acceptable to him, but BY GOD he is doing something about it. And by "something" I mean blowing shit up. It’s all very complicated--having something to do with the Iroquois and the natural state of man and a precursor to Cold War containment policy--but Colin has decided that the best way to prevent the pernicious spread of capitalism is to halt its westward spread. With explosives. It sounded a lot better in his head. Colin refuses to wear a hat, because it makes his hair look silly. He is also a very skilled marksman, thanks in no small part to MIT's physical education program, and has yet to learn that shooting people, while easier in the West, is still reasonably illegal there. Good-natured to a fault, he also comes with his own manly skillset, which includes demolitions engineering and the administration of fellatio. You heard me.
Picture it: you’re a girl in her teens in a swiftly dying mining town, and one day an exciting, tall, dark stranger rides into town on a black stallion looking for a place to hide. An exciting, tall, dark stranger nearly your own age, even. You fall hard for him and offer your most precious flower of maidenhood unto him, but he refuses to take you up on it unless he can give you some money. It’s to help you, he says. Since you’re so special to him, he really wants to support you in every way he can. You feel a little funny about it, but then he gives you this look that makes you feel an entirely different kind of funny, and you decide that if your preacher daddy really knew what he was talking about he wouldn’t have gotten his fool ass shot in the back two years ago. A few years later, you’re not really a hooker, since you don’t entertain clients other than the exciting, tall, dark stranger (who, as it turns out, is a lot less exciting now that a few years have passed, and also not as tall as you thought, relatively speaking), but he does still pay you for intercourse, which kind of DOES make you a hooker. And yes, you could leave, but really, would you want to give him the satisfaction? Really, the best thing to do is to stay and keep taking his money. That’d show him. And besides, the sex is still pretty great. This is because you hate him.
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