Post by Maximilien Robespierre on Dec 2, 2007 21:48:14 GMT -5
The Roleplayer
Name: Tali
Age: sixteen
Contacts: (removed)
Experience: Four years on and off.
Activity Level: Pretty active. I'm on every night and usually for a while.
Graphics Ability: I can use Photoshop with some adeptness, but I'm more of an icons girl than a layouts girl, though I can probably learn. Also, I can match colors.
Favorite Book: Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, Fire from Heaven by Mary Renault, The Portrait of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde and The Long Good-bye by Raymond Chandler. I have often found that books are like pringles; you can't love just one.
Opinion on the Site so Far: It looks pretty darn cool (and Ali is made of win).
The Character
Full Name: Caden Addington
Nicknames: Cade, Cadie, "hey, you, the one who doesn't look quite so stupid as all the others"
Age: 21
Side: The good side, though Caden goes wherever Basil goes (if he knows what's good for him, and he does).
What is he? Caden is a low-level empath. He can feel most strong emotions and weak, simple ones, but complex emotions like guilt, jealousy or pride elude him. Powerful emotions, especially coming from more than one person, tend to overwhelm him, and he becomes dizzy and has a nasty tendency to black out at all the wrong moments.
Appearance: Caden struggled long and hard to look the part of a starving artist cum college student. Since joining Basil's elite team of shockingly well-paid underlings, he has noticed an alarming shift in his wardrobe away from grubby t-shirts and scuffed sneakers and toward jeans with three-digit price tags and things with buttons. He has shirts in green and purple and orange, and some of his pants has pleats in the right places. The suit for the office is surely too ghastly to think of (not that he actually wears it; it isn't practical for field work). Most of the time, though, Caden sports a t-shirt and jeans and sneakers so old they've forgotten what clean is.
In a vain attempt to be fashionably bohemian, Caden grew his hair out. He pulls it back in a sleek, dirty blond ponytail and tells himself that he will cut it off the next time he is at the barber's (trips with out cutting: 3). His pouty mouth tends to crumple into a thin line when he's trying to look intelligent (but mostly failing to look intelligent) in front of Basil. His snub nose and plethora of freckles give him a boyish look. Caden's one concession to his change of profession is daily visits to the gym. At five foot eight, Caden isn't exactly intimidating to the thugs he meets on the job, and he can use any help he can get. (But, really, that's what police officers are for, isn't it?)
Character Playby: None.
Personality: Easy-going and happy to go with the flow, Caden tries not to stand out. His lifelong ambition is to become Normal, a word that receives a capital letter in his mind the way that conspiracy theorists capitalize the Conspiracy when they discuss their latest set of paranoias. The best way to keep the current of emotions around him down to a whisper is to be neither especially interesting nor to provoke any kind of reaction, and Caden has slowly perfected an every-man persona that he parades about for his friends. He tells them that he does clerical work for an agency that investigates tax fraud, which he likes to think isn't entirely untrue because he bets that Basil has, at least once, investigated seriously massive tax fraud, probably in connection with gang members, drugs and the illegal imports racket, and he, Caden, has on occasion paper-clipped reports together.
While hardly reserved, Caden avoids forming strong bonds; he has many friends but few close ones. His ability to sense emotion heightens over the course of a relationship, and he finds the effect even more unnerving than the usual flow of low-grade happiness and disappointment. Because of his ability to sense others' emotions, he does get along with them extraordinarily well when he chooses to, a skill he isn't averse to using in the short run, especially at the better sort of parties.
Likes:
Carry-out: Things that come in plastic containers just taste better, and Caden is all for minimal effort, especially when he's trying to feed himself.
Libraries: Caden happily flocks to any place that isn't exciting. Who gets emotional about a library?
Basil: Anyone who hires Caden and pays him a tidy salary is fine in his book.
Photography
Detective novels: Now, let's face it: Dashiell Hammett is the real reason that he went along with Basil in the first place. Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe make Caden go all woobly inside.
Houseplants: Lush, green and emitting a low-grade contentment, the only dependent living thing he will tolerate are his houseplants, which range from exotic to everyday.
Dislikes:
Tidying: Clean is just for other people. As long as he can find things in the mess, he's fine (and don't even think about fussing with it).
Basil: He has a wake of angry disillusionment. Nothing says irritating like a boss who gives you headaches without even realizing it. Also, he likes cats.
Cats: No animal should lick its dirty feet and then use them to clean itself and have the audacity to pretend to be fastidious. Also, they shed, and Caden likes to have the option of wearing dark colors.
Cooking: Caden relishes the bachelor lifestyle; his favorite appliance is the microwave. If he can't cook it in less than five minutes by dint of pressing buttons only, it's far too much effort.
Movie theatres: Nowhere can one find more rushes of emotions shared by more people than in front of the silver screen, and nothing seems to leave Caden heaving over a toilet longer.
Strengths:
The people: Caden is far better at sizing up witnesses, suspects and cops than he is at interpreting the evidence, especially in the field.
Crime scene photos: An ex-photo major, he adores taking photos on the scene, though he is often guilty of trying to create a good composition when he should just be documenting the scene.
Motives: Given a list of suspects, evidence and his own intuition (or, rather, the scraps of emotion picked up at the scene), he can generally find a motive for everyone, each as likely as the next.
.Weaknesses:
The evidence: Things, while they don't usually give him pesky emotional castoff, require far more interpretation and he is--
Impatient
Crimes of passion: Give him a nice serial killer or mob hit any day because, as easy as these are to interpret, lingering anger at the scene makes Caden stagger.
Independent: He finds it easiest to concentrate when working alone, but he prefers to talk at someone to work out a case. When he can hear his thoughts, he can piece them together.
Self-centered
Fears:
Strengthening of his powers
Basil giving up on him
The case he just can't solve
Family Tree:
Mother: Louisa Addington née Prinne, in her early forties and a former elementary school teacher but now mostly volunteer and failed philanthropist, lives in New York with his stepfather. She likes snow angels in their backyard made by the kids who live next door and the tacky ornaments that kids make when they're seven that have too much glitter and colorful construction paper. She dotes on her only son, but the distance means that she doesn't see much of him, and she worries constantly.
Stepfather: Alexander Addington is a successful defense attorney who continues to practice. He enjoys Italian food and his wife's cooking, and he plays a fairly good game of golf. He considers Caden to be his son as much as Louisa's and has no biological children of his own. He is fairly well off and finances most of Louisa's philanthropic ventures. He is some ten years older than his wife and is in his mid to late fifties.
Father: Henry Jennings is almost a mythical figure; nothing of his three and a half years married to Louisa remains, and Caden remains blissfully ignorant that of his other father. He lives in Utah and works fairly anonymously in the marketing division of a large company.
History:
Caden is the unwitting child of a college romance gone sour. His parents married at twenty-three and divorced by age twenty-seven with only a big-eyed toddler and a pile of credit card debts to show for it. His father made no effort to get custody, and Caden was left with his mother who got herself a small apartment and a position as a paralegal in Los Angeles. Louisa remarried a few scant months before Caden's fourth birthday, and he is none the wiser, thinking Alexander, Louisa's second husband, to be his father. Caden had the glorious bad fortune to attend public schools in a state that doesn't see the need to adequately fund them, and while his education was not neglected, he definitely might have done better elsewhere.
He spent most of his childhood poodling around the neighborhood with his best friend and getting into more trouble than any child really should. Alexander moved the family to Rochester to pursue a job opportunity when Caden was twelve. Taken away from his friends, Caden settled down to his academics. His grades considerably improved, but he never became a straight A student.
Shortly after the move, his powers began to manifest themselves. Unable to explain them to anyone else and unwilling to demonstrate them, he found to his horror that he could sense the drift of his classmates' emotions. He made a few friends, but spent most of his free time hidden in the school or public libraries, where the overly emotional rarely tread and where he hoped to find a convenient explanation of his powers being just a phase. Slowly, he learned to block out the dull roar and only catch the occasional burst of anger or fear.
Caden had his first run-in with the horror of the heightening of his powers in response to his own increased closeness with a person. After being bombarded with the hail of emotions from the diners at a nice restaurant, he and his date went to see a movie, and he felt, for the first (and last) time, the wave of sympathetic embarrassment for the heroine as she made a faux pas in front of her hunky boss. Having been to many films before and discovered that most films incited emotional reactions in a range too complex for him to interpret, he was shocked that he had felt anything other than a faint tugging at the back of his mind. Embarrassment being a fairly potent human emotion, Caden found himself fighting to keep down his pasta bolognese.
Stumbling blindly through the process of discovering what exactly would worsen an already embarrassing talent for sensing his classmates' emotions, Caden decided to put a temporary moratorium on dating, though he has lately realized that it has become fairly permanent. He slowly came to realize that any close relationship would make trips to the cinema, to museums, even to restaurants, unbearable because of the increased strength of his empathy.
In his junior year, Caden finally sacrificed his pride and took a photography class for his required art credit. He found that he actually quite enjoyed it, and it quickly translated into a surprisingly large collection of camera paraphernalia. In order to look the part, he took up the habit of smoking during his senior year. When it came time for him to apply to college, he tried to get into several well-regarded fine arts programs. Caden found himself at USC, not far from his childhood home. He is a photography major or, rather, he was until Basil found him at a career fair and dragged him away from a life of starving artistry into a life of detective work.
And then he came to Shawl.
Caden reluctantly let go of his tiny apartment near campus and now commutes from Shawl, where he rents a small house. He quit smoking cold turkey; the only condition of his being hiring was that he drop the habit. He refuses to admit that he is there for good, but it is fairly clear that he is going to stay.
Roleplay Sample:
This is in present tense. I do not usually roleplay in present tense. Do not have a coronary; I will post another sample if present tense is so objectionable as to be unreadable.
Name: Tali
Age: sixteen
Contacts: (removed)
Experience: Four years on and off.
Activity Level: Pretty active. I'm on every night and usually for a while.
Graphics Ability: I can use Photoshop with some adeptness, but I'm more of an icons girl than a layouts girl, though I can probably learn. Also, I can match colors.
Favorite Book: Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, Fire from Heaven by Mary Renault, The Portrait of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde and The Long Good-bye by Raymond Chandler. I have often found that books are like pringles; you can't love just one.
Opinion on the Site so Far: It looks pretty darn cool (and Ali is made of win).
The Character
Full Name: Caden Addington
Nicknames: Cade, Cadie, "hey, you, the one who doesn't look quite so stupid as all the others"
Age: 21
Side: The good side, though Caden goes wherever Basil goes (if he knows what's good for him, and he does).
What is he? Caden is a low-level empath. He can feel most strong emotions and weak, simple ones, but complex emotions like guilt, jealousy or pride elude him. Powerful emotions, especially coming from more than one person, tend to overwhelm him, and he becomes dizzy and has a nasty tendency to black out at all the wrong moments.
Appearance: Caden struggled long and hard to look the part of a starving artist cum college student. Since joining Basil's elite team of shockingly well-paid underlings, he has noticed an alarming shift in his wardrobe away from grubby t-shirts and scuffed sneakers and toward jeans with three-digit price tags and things with buttons. He has shirts in green and purple and orange, and some of his pants has pleats in the right places. The suit for the office is surely too ghastly to think of (not that he actually wears it; it isn't practical for field work). Most of the time, though, Caden sports a t-shirt and jeans and sneakers so old they've forgotten what clean is.
In a vain attempt to be fashionably bohemian, Caden grew his hair out. He pulls it back in a sleek, dirty blond ponytail and tells himself that he will cut it off the next time he is at the barber's (trips with out cutting: 3). His pouty mouth tends to crumple into a thin line when he's trying to look intelligent (but mostly failing to look intelligent) in front of Basil. His snub nose and plethora of freckles give him a boyish look. Caden's one concession to his change of profession is daily visits to the gym. At five foot eight, Caden isn't exactly intimidating to the thugs he meets on the job, and he can use any help he can get. (But, really, that's what police officers are for, isn't it?)
Character Playby: None.
Personality: Easy-going and happy to go with the flow, Caden tries not to stand out. His lifelong ambition is to become Normal, a word that receives a capital letter in his mind the way that conspiracy theorists capitalize the Conspiracy when they discuss their latest set of paranoias. The best way to keep the current of emotions around him down to a whisper is to be neither especially interesting nor to provoke any kind of reaction, and Caden has slowly perfected an every-man persona that he parades about for his friends. He tells them that he does clerical work for an agency that investigates tax fraud, which he likes to think isn't entirely untrue because he bets that Basil has, at least once, investigated seriously massive tax fraud, probably in connection with gang members, drugs and the illegal imports racket, and he, Caden, has on occasion paper-clipped reports together.
While hardly reserved, Caden avoids forming strong bonds; he has many friends but few close ones. His ability to sense emotion heightens over the course of a relationship, and he finds the effect even more unnerving than the usual flow of low-grade happiness and disappointment. Because of his ability to sense others' emotions, he does get along with them extraordinarily well when he chooses to, a skill he isn't averse to using in the short run, especially at the better sort of parties.
Likes:
Carry-out: Things that come in plastic containers just taste better, and Caden is all for minimal effort, especially when he's trying to feed himself.
Libraries: Caden happily flocks to any place that isn't exciting. Who gets emotional about a library?
Basil: Anyone who hires Caden and pays him a tidy salary is fine in his book.
Photography
Detective novels: Now, let's face it: Dashiell Hammett is the real reason that he went along with Basil in the first place. Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe make Caden go all woobly inside.
Houseplants: Lush, green and emitting a low-grade contentment, the only dependent living thing he will tolerate are his houseplants, which range from exotic to everyday.
Dislikes:
Tidying: Clean is just for other people. As long as he can find things in the mess, he's fine (and don't even think about fussing with it).
Basil: He has a wake of angry disillusionment. Nothing says irritating like a boss who gives you headaches without even realizing it. Also, he likes cats.
Cats: No animal should lick its dirty feet and then use them to clean itself and have the audacity to pretend to be fastidious. Also, they shed, and Caden likes to have the option of wearing dark colors.
Cooking: Caden relishes the bachelor lifestyle; his favorite appliance is the microwave. If he can't cook it in less than five minutes by dint of pressing buttons only, it's far too much effort.
Movie theatres: Nowhere can one find more rushes of emotions shared by more people than in front of the silver screen, and nothing seems to leave Caden heaving over a toilet longer.
Strengths:
The people: Caden is far better at sizing up witnesses, suspects and cops than he is at interpreting the evidence, especially in the field.
Crime scene photos: An ex-photo major, he adores taking photos on the scene, though he is often guilty of trying to create a good composition when he should just be documenting the scene.
Motives: Given a list of suspects, evidence and his own intuition (or, rather, the scraps of emotion picked up at the scene), he can generally find a motive for everyone, each as likely as the next.
.Weaknesses:
The evidence: Things, while they don't usually give him pesky emotional castoff, require far more interpretation and he is--
Impatient
Crimes of passion: Give him a nice serial killer or mob hit any day because, as easy as these are to interpret, lingering anger at the scene makes Caden stagger.
Independent: He finds it easiest to concentrate when working alone, but he prefers to talk at someone to work out a case. When he can hear his thoughts, he can piece them together.
Self-centered
Fears:
Strengthening of his powers
Basil giving up on him
The case he just can't solve
Family Tree:
Mother: Louisa Addington née Prinne, in her early forties and a former elementary school teacher but now mostly volunteer and failed philanthropist, lives in New York with his stepfather. She likes snow angels in their backyard made by the kids who live next door and the tacky ornaments that kids make when they're seven that have too much glitter and colorful construction paper. She dotes on her only son, but the distance means that she doesn't see much of him, and she worries constantly.
Stepfather: Alexander Addington is a successful defense attorney who continues to practice. He enjoys Italian food and his wife's cooking, and he plays a fairly good game of golf. He considers Caden to be his son as much as Louisa's and has no biological children of his own. He is fairly well off and finances most of Louisa's philanthropic ventures. He is some ten years older than his wife and is in his mid to late fifties.
Father: Henry Jennings is almost a mythical figure; nothing of his three and a half years married to Louisa remains, and Caden remains blissfully ignorant that of his other father. He lives in Utah and works fairly anonymously in the marketing division of a large company.
History:
Caden is the unwitting child of a college romance gone sour. His parents married at twenty-three and divorced by age twenty-seven with only a big-eyed toddler and a pile of credit card debts to show for it. His father made no effort to get custody, and Caden was left with his mother who got herself a small apartment and a position as a paralegal in Los Angeles. Louisa remarried a few scant months before Caden's fourth birthday, and he is none the wiser, thinking Alexander, Louisa's second husband, to be his father. Caden had the glorious bad fortune to attend public schools in a state that doesn't see the need to adequately fund them, and while his education was not neglected, he definitely might have done better elsewhere.
He spent most of his childhood poodling around the neighborhood with his best friend and getting into more trouble than any child really should. Alexander moved the family to Rochester to pursue a job opportunity when Caden was twelve. Taken away from his friends, Caden settled down to his academics. His grades considerably improved, but he never became a straight A student.
Shortly after the move, his powers began to manifest themselves. Unable to explain them to anyone else and unwilling to demonstrate them, he found to his horror that he could sense the drift of his classmates' emotions. He made a few friends, but spent most of his free time hidden in the school or public libraries, where the overly emotional rarely tread and where he hoped to find a convenient explanation of his powers being just a phase. Slowly, he learned to block out the dull roar and only catch the occasional burst of anger or fear.
Caden had his first run-in with the horror of the heightening of his powers in response to his own increased closeness with a person. After being bombarded with the hail of emotions from the diners at a nice restaurant, he and his date went to see a movie, and he felt, for the first (and last) time, the wave of sympathetic embarrassment for the heroine as she made a faux pas in front of her hunky boss. Having been to many films before and discovered that most films incited emotional reactions in a range too complex for him to interpret, he was shocked that he had felt anything other than a faint tugging at the back of his mind. Embarrassment being a fairly potent human emotion, Caden found himself fighting to keep down his pasta bolognese.
Stumbling blindly through the process of discovering what exactly would worsen an already embarrassing talent for sensing his classmates' emotions, Caden decided to put a temporary moratorium on dating, though he has lately realized that it has become fairly permanent. He slowly came to realize that any close relationship would make trips to the cinema, to museums, even to restaurants, unbearable because of the increased strength of his empathy.
In his junior year, Caden finally sacrificed his pride and took a photography class for his required art credit. He found that he actually quite enjoyed it, and it quickly translated into a surprisingly large collection of camera paraphernalia. In order to look the part, he took up the habit of smoking during his senior year. When it came time for him to apply to college, he tried to get into several well-regarded fine arts programs. Caden found himself at USC, not far from his childhood home. He is a photography major or, rather, he was until Basil found him at a career fair and dragged him away from a life of starving artistry into a life of detective work.
And then he came to Shawl.
Caden reluctantly let go of his tiny apartment near campus and now commutes from Shawl, where he rents a small house. He quit smoking cold turkey; the only condition of his being hiring was that he drop the habit. He refuses to admit that he is there for good, but it is fairly clear that he is going to stay.
Roleplay Sample:
This is in present tense. I do not usually roleplay in present tense. Do not have a coronary; I will post another sample if present tense is so objectionable as to be unreadable.