Robert Lynch

Robert's beady blue eyes dart quickly around his environment. His black hair is longer than his sister approves of and he's anticipating that one day soon he'll wake up bald. His frame is slim and, while not exactly feeble, far from athletic. His girth, coupled with his height of only 5'9'' has often made Rob wonder if he was meant to turn out gay, or at least a bit more metrosexual. He wears jeans and a white t-shirt every day unless he's told to do otherwise. His face is attractive but uneventful and his skin is an annoying shade of pale.

Robert learned early in life that everything fit into a class. His family was lower-middle class, his dad was a drunk and a deadbeat, his mother was a whore and a druggie. Robert never liked words, though. He used numbers to classify things. Some things are odd and some are even, some are big and some are small. There's some stuff you can divide and there are some things you can't. Rob manages to drive himself half-insane whenever he becomes nervous. On his wedding day, Rob calmed himself by counting the amount of people that showed up - 219 guests and 6 staff members if anyone is counting. On the day he caught his wife with another man, Rob attempted to count the lines on the street as he drove home. He'd gotten to 968 before he had to stop for fear of his life.

Besides the meticulous counting, Rob's personality is warm but distant. Once he's decided you're a person he can let in, he's like a person you've known forever. He uses numbers and patterns to try and hide who he really is; a nervous, slightly neurotic person who just wishes life was simpler. He doesn't trust anyone other than himself and maybe his sister. That's part of the reason he grew so attached to numbers - they can't let you down or lie to you.

Robert has spent most of his life trying to come to terms with the fact that people weren't like numbers. Numbers can change, but only with a strict set of rules. Addition, multiplication, exponents, they all make sense. People don't make sense.

Early in his life, Rob attempted to classify everyone. His little sister was like the number 2. She was round and even, not to mention the she was the second child. His mother did everything in never-ending excess, so he always thought of her as pi. His Dad was some weird number like 97. You could forget about it sometimes but it just seemed difficult whenever it did come around. The others on the subway all got numbers. The people in suits were 11. The ones reading were 20. A lot of the people in suits also read newspapers. That presented a problem Robert never really could find an answer to.

Robert could never find an answer to a lot of things. Why on Earth would two people decide to raise their children in New York City? When those people were David and Emily Lynch, the answer was that they just didn't care. Since the were too strung out on alcohol or drugs to ever really give a damn, Robert had to teach himself how to use the subway so he could get to school. The next year he had to do the same, with the added responsibility of getting his sister Alex there. From the first day that he could remember, Alex had meant the world to him. But these moments, sitting on the subway at age 6, were the first time that he really felt that older brother connection to his sister. He had to protect her or die trying. He'd always known that, just not in so many words. Rob hadn't liked to think about death at age 6 any more than he liked to think about it now. It was such a weird thing, death. So impossible to predict. And it was so final. Rob could never find a number to suit death, but supposed zero or infinity to be the likeliest candidates.

Not many people ever thought that Rob would get married right out of High School. But he always knew that he needed to be two. He was alone, he was just one. One was odd. You could add and subtract it, but that was about all. Being two would be so much better; there was so much you could do with a number like two.

Elizabeth was a beautiful creature. Rob had found it surprising that a woman that beautiful was a loner. On days he didn't think she'd mind - he'd always found people to be more open on Wednesdays - Rob would watch Eliza as she ran on the track. She didn't run with the others, she sprinted ahead of them. They were always running to something - Eliza had been running from it. She didn't have a boyfriend until the day Robert Lynch finally gathered the courage to ask her out. She'd always thought that it was ironic that the most insecure person in her school was the one who finally made her feel confident about herself. They decided to go to college together, moving in with each other to save on costs. After a while, marriage just seemed like the next step. Rob often found it funny to joke that his wife had been insane to marry him. Sadly, she soon came to agree with him. His job at bank paid the bills and they were promising to promote him as soon as another accountant position opened up. That didn't mean he didn't feel bad about the fact that his wife was making more money than him. Her job as a health and wellness instructor at the local gym brought in nearly double that of what Rob made. Emasculated at the thought of being even more of the beta-male in a marriage, Rob soon came in contact with the Gargoyles. Filtering the money through for them had been easy enough. And, for a few months, Robert thought his life was going back up. He was making more money and his wife was being more affectionate. Perhaps if he'd been there more often he'd have noticed that she was covering something up.

Only August 3rd, 2115, a day Rob still thinks about every day, a loving husband stopped by his wife's gym to see if she wanted to eat lunch with him. He instead managed to walk in on her and the gym's aerobic instructor having sex. Unable to believe that Eliza was that cold, Rob blamed himself. He'd been spending more and more time helping the Gargoyles and less time with his wife. He knew that cutting off ties with them would be hard and it probably wouldn't help anyway. So, he got deeper instead. The day after his divorce became official, Rob helped them pull off the biggest bank heist in recent history and managed to win a hundred thousand dollar lawsuit against the bank in the process.

Full of money and full of sadness, Rob worked full-time for the Gargoyles then. He gladly moved to Boston when the idea was pitched to him, hoping for a fresh new start. He was even happier to find out that there would be a familiar face there, emphatically agreeing when his sister asked to move in with him. He's still very protective of her though, desperate to keep what he does for a living from screwing up her life.