Daniel Bach

Daniel Bach
Location
Region:	Solomon Island
Zone:	Savage Coast
Background Information
Species:	Human
NPC Information
NPC Type:	Mission

Just ask his ex-publishers, ask the Marine units he was embedded with in Iraq, ask his wife, another notoriously pitiless journalist. Ask his parents, ask every victim of his callous but accurate exposes. Hell, ask the man himself, ask it right into to those obnoxious opaque aviator glasses, and he'd smile and agree.

An asshole, everyone knows, with a death wish. Bach volunteers for the most dangerous assignments, knowing his edge is his recklessness and willingness to do what others won't. But since he stumbled out of the desert during the Iraq War, eyes burning, there's been something else going on with Bach; an obsession beyond the old obsessions. For the first time, he’s after something more than getting the jump on a story, more than reporting from the crater the second after the bomb hits.

At first, everyone thought he'd developed a taste for atrocities instead of the Pulitzer. After all, he does write about human misery like a restaurant critic discussing a meal. Then he fell off the war circuit to start digging into a 25-year-old missing persons case. No one important. Even his enemies had to admit he was punching below his weight.

But Bach has been watching and planning and waiting for months. Zeroing in, up and down Maine and New Hampshire. Following in the footsteps of witch trials, Wabanaki Council legends and Sam Krieg horror novels.

Bach, that asshole, hasn't lost his edge: he's finally found where he can go over it.

Missions

Initiated

• Hell and Bach
• Hell Hath No Vacancy
• Into The Inferno

Involved in

• Bring it Bach - On the beach behind the Overlook Motel

Dialogue

Yourself

Call me whacked, everyone does, just don't call me a thrillseeker. No, no, no. Perspective: car surfing's a thrill, sprinting across railway bridges is a thrill. War reporting isn't a thrill. It's an assignment, it's a duty. It's why they don't hand out Pulitzer s for base jumping. It's about redefining your view of mortality. For yourself, and for the other guys. To tell people it's not indiscriminate death, period, it's indiscriminate death, comma. Someone has to be the hell-chaser. When I finally found the real thing, I hardly felt surprised. Turns out that Hell is a whole lot like home. No matter that I've been desensitized by mass graves and hate crimes and Fox News and fucking Burger King. The air tastes like bleach fumes and the way the light falls is all wrong, too red and too overexposed, but it's a whole lot like home. I don't see any great cosmic moral in that, though.

Hell

You wanna page from my memoirs, bud? I first saw it in Afghanistan. Down in the caves, the real old caves, the ones the Taliban dynamited the shit out of along with those big Buddhas. Opened something they couldn't close again. Finest military ordnance the taxpayer's money can fund barely closed it. Picture if you will a squad of huge-ass marines, doing all they could not to piss their pants. Praying to every god in the directory. I just squatted in my own mess and wrote until my hands seized up. Gibberish. Total shit, that's what it turned out I wrote. That's what the camp docs made of it, too. Check it off under battlefield trauma, heat exhaustion, second-degree sunburn. Mass hallucination. Gave us a lot of prescription drugs I dumped in the desert. Seriously, take two if visions of fucking howling, screaming purgatory persist? I don't know what happened to the other guys, at least, not all of them. Let's say I took it better than most.

The Secret World

Yeah, I know I've been busting your chops, but that's just me, I'm an asshole. Unrepentant. I appreciate the company, no shit. You don't get a lot of it when you're going a million miles an hour. F5-ing the world every ten seconds. If I lived to do an autobiography, it would've been an RSS feed. There were two people who really got my angle. My grandfather, who told me I was always jumping freight trains straight to hell. And Claudio - my wife - maybe you read her, wrote for the Village Voice before the buyout. Yeah we had it good, same wavelength, didn't want kids, gymnastic shit in the bedroom... Things weren't the same after I did Georgia. The country, not the dancer at the 5th Age, Claudia was totally accommodating. Sitting in the back of an open jeep, in the rain, with Hell on my mind. I knew just where to find it. Someone, something was calling me there. We had a...real special moment in the ruins. The glasses haven't come off since.

Trivia

• The voice actor for Daniel Bach is Michael Yurchak

Media

Images

• 

  Daniel, in-game

• 

  Concept art