OUT OF CHARACTER INFORMATION.
NAME: Rian.
AGE: 21!
TIME ZONE: Arizona (PST atm)
CONTACT INFORMATION: caraway1914 (AIM) and moc.liamg|4091yawarac#moc.liamg|4091yawarac
PREVIOUS EXPERIENCE: You can link to past journals, games, and threads or a compilation journal!
IN CHARACTER INFORMATION.
NAME: Jean-Luc Robert Haupert-Collins. Since this looks retarded all written out and is mostly unpronouncable to English speakers, he goes by John Collins or John Haupert-Collins in the States.
AGE / BIRTHDATE: 24 / January 14th. BORN ON A COLD WINTER'S EVE, etc.
SEXUALITY: Technically heterosexual, but who could ever learn to love a beast deformed freak?
BIRTHPLACE: Austin, Texas, though he grew up for the most part in Europe.
YEAR: Senior. He had to skip two years of university due to the accident and recovery time, and he's currently debating what he wants to do after graduation.
MAJOR: History, with minors in German and Italian.
EXTRACURRICULARS: None. Dude is a freak, why would he want to socialise MORE?
CURRENT RESIDENCE: Off-campus, in his family's sprawling, expensive, fourteen-bedroom estate. Does he need fourteen bedrooms? No. But when your mother's a European diplomat and your father's a wildly successful businessman, you don't just live in a regular house.
APPEARANCE: John was once a very attractive young man. He had his mother's pale coloring and dark eyes, and his father's strong jaw and lean build. His hair was well-styled, he only dressed in the best, and he generally looked like a million bucks. Being set on fire and left for dead took its toll on that, to say the least. The flames missed most of his face, and the military skin regenerative therapy he's currently undergoing is slowly regrowing the cells that were destroyed over the rest of his body, but there's no getting around the fact that 40% of his skin suffered severe burns in his very recent history. His chest, arms, back, neck, the lower part of his jaw, left hand, and left leg are all marked by varying degrees of ruined flesh and pale red burn scars, not to mention the right knee that doesn't bend properly and the scars from the stabbing along his abdomen. For the most part, he wears clothes that cover him from ankles to chin: sweatshirts, jeans, long-sleeve tee-shirts, etc. Around the house and when not wanting to be noticed in public (which is most public excursions), he sticks to the basics — sweatshirt, long pants, close-toed shoes and hat — as well as some kind of light scarf and, if around people he will have to see again, gloves. It's absurdly hot, but he does not even care, and stays indoors most of the time anyway. He also has a predliection for suits (tailored, naturally), that carries over from when he was an aspiring businessman. Despite the burns, a well-cut suit never ceases to make a man look good. Still, his complete lack of desire to be seen by human eyes has let him grow his hair out long, forsaken his contacts for unflattering glasses most days, and even made him gain a little weight in the immediate time after the accident. Since then he has used the private gym facilities in his estate to keep trim, but he'll never be as fit as he was before the accident. He also can't grow anything substantial in the way of facial hair due to the burns, and is often subject to an idiotic goatee thing when he doesn't shave.
Oh, and he has to walk with a cane when it gets really cold and humid. Feel free to call it the pimp cane. It might make him feel better about himself.
PLAYED BY: Josh Hartnett.
PERSONALITY:
John is an angry young man. Can you blame him? Father dies when he's 17 and away at school, mother shuns him for acting out, and he ends up a mutilated pseudo-human for what seems to increasingly be the rest of his sad, pathetic life. He had everything before him, and it all got swept away. Being a generally insensible sort, anger was the logical conclusion. He's angry at his mother, at his father for dying, at his sister for not being around to support him, at the London muggers who attacked him, at normal people for having normal lives, at his doctor's for not being able to restore his good looks and physicality. If there's something or someone to be angry at, John's got it covered. In fact, even if there isn't something or someone to be angry at, John's probably mad at them anyway. He has a habit of falling into sullen rages, of screaming for the smallest infractions, of hurling things at walls and retiring to the west wing of his house, not to be disturbed. The staff at the estate has long since learned to just nod and do as John says, and the pay is good enough that they stick around. He values having them there, taking care of him when no one else will (even if it's only because of their wages), but he also can't stand them for being able to return home to their normal families and normal, non-scarred lives.
As a direct result, like any proper mysterious recluse and angst bucket, John is lonely. No, he doesn't wish for ~love~ and ~companionship~ (though that would be nice), but he would like to have someone around who doesn't flinch when he unwinds his scarf and all those scars peeked through, when he comes out of the shower looking like some Marvel hero gone wrong. He hasn't had real friends since before the accident, since he started pushing everyone away in misplaced rage at his father's death, and it doesn't look like that'll stop any time soon. On the one hand, he realises the way he acts is not best suited to gaining trust; on the other, fuck 'em. People aren't dependable anyway.
Still, he has his good points. Underneath that gruff exterior, he's got a real fondness for learning — about people, places, events. School doesn't interest him much, but he's had a wing of the house remodeled into a soaring library and has it nearly filled with stack upon stack of books. He's a slow learner, often compounded with his obstinance (and, ok, petulance; he can be something of a whiny bitch from time to time, especially when told he's wrong), but it's not entirely impossible to get through to him. Just really, really, really hard. He loves his sister and has a certain soft spot for dogs, neither of which anybody is likely to learn soon. Whatever good points he does have, everything is eclipsed by his unequivocal (as unequivocal as a 20-something can be) desire for anonymity. He may have a good soul under all that anger, but the fact of the matter is that he would much rather stay alone and safe than risk being shunned and ostracised by the general public for his scars. So he sits alone his is estate, brooding and being angry at the world, hoping by some magical interference he'll run into someone he can keep around who won't be a total dick, and generally being sort of a twat. Vicious cycle, but there you have it.
LIKES: European history, steak, not-humid days, walking without a cane, overly priced wine, throwing overly priced wine at walls, being ~alone~, Luxembourg, swimming, tailored suits, Tchaikovsky, his sister.
DISLIKES: The world, London, everyone, happy people, alpha males, constricting clothes, synthetic fabrics (they chafe), really cold weather, Justin Timberlake, Victor Hugo (sorry, sir, it is not acceptable to inform your readers that rocks fall and everyone dies ALL THE TIME).
HISTORY:
Jean-Luc Haupert-Collins was born with a silver spoon the size of Turkey in his mouth. His father, Robert Collins, was an aspiring young businessman visiting Europe to seek some financial backers for his company, when he met Lucille Haupert, the daughter of a Luxembourgian politician and something of a diplomat herself. They hit it off immediately, and after Robert proposed, Mr. Haupert surprised them both by providing the start-up capital for a Luxembourg office for Robert's company. Things only prospered from there.
John's sister Adele was born in their home in Luxembourg, but John attained dual citizenship when born during an extended vacation to Robert's family in Texas. Austin agreed with Lucille, and she and Robert remained there for the first few years of John's life; but when her father passed away back in Europe, leaving his position in the Chamber of Deputies open, it was right back to Luxembourg. Within two years, Lucille — who had been gunning for a government position since before she had even met Robert — was elected into the Chamber, and the family settled permanently in the tiny European nation.
John and Adele spent most of their childhood in private boarding schools, Adele at her mother's alma mater in Switzerland and John at his grandfather's in England; they saw little of their parents well into their late teens, and it was as such that it took several days after the event for either to hear of their father's car accident. Nothing faulty, the detectives said; no evidence of foul play. Robert had simply been driving and suffered a head-on collision with a rather larger car than his slim BMW convertible, and died on impact. Lucille, being independly wealthy (indeed, almost wealthier than her husband), received a small sum from the will, but the majority was signed over to their children, who would become executors of their own estates at 21. Small consolation for losing a father, but they would have to make do.
Adele, six years senior, handled the situation far more deftly than her brother. She saw the necessary therapists, went to the necessary sympathy meetings, comforted her mother and made speeches representing both sprogs when the news crews came calling. Within a year, she had dealt with her grief and moved on. John, on the other hand, did as most teenage boys do: he got angry. He had never been a particularly fast-moving sort of boy, so it took a while for the adolescent ~rage~ to fester into something dangerous, but it got there. His father died when he was 17. By 18, he had isolated himself from most of his previous friends at the boys' college, started hanging around with a group known for their less than savory habits. His sister's phone calls checking on his welfare grew more and more distressed, and his mother, in a heated moment, even used the term "political liability."
Things came to a head at 19. John had no intention of going to university, but every intention of frittering away the estate left to him on booze, whatever pills and powders his mates shoved at him, and pretty women. He was young, rich, attractive, and in the prime of life. So what if his father had died and he hadn't dealt with it. So what if his mother didn't want him around. In fact, John's reaction to much of his spiralling-out-of-control life was "so what." When he came stumbling out of a dive bar with two equally drunken friends, then, his immediate reaction to the chavs attempting to mug him was — you guessed it. "So what?"
It was a routine mugging, really, or at least was intended to be. John and his mates smuggled a bottle of tequila out of a Tesco into a seedy London bar, and on falling out, laughing and drunk, the muggers made their move. Stabbings had been on the rise in central London, and that was the first thing on their agenda. John's friend went down first, not quite realising what was happening to him until he was bleeding out against a wall. They took his wallet, his keys, his watch and designer shades. John, drunkenly, stupidly, and not really caring much for the consequences except not bending over and taking it, fought back. It did not end well. He wasn't nearly competent enough to hold his own, and the young Londoner's knife went to work quickly. John was too inebriated to realise his punches weren't quite connecting, and by the time the mugger had taken the tequila bottle and dumped it on John's bleeding, prostrate form, he had no idea what was going on. Neither John nor the muggers really knew what they were doing next, but someone pulled out a lighter, flicked it, tossed it, ran. If the little Indian shopkeeper across the street from the alley didn't see the sudden flare up of fire, John might have very well burnt to a crisp right there in a dingy London street.
They rushed him to the hospital, and were able to save him, but the doctors said there was nothing for the burns or the damage they had done. That is, until word reached them of an experimental new treatment at a Florida hospital*: military surgeons were testing a salamander-inspired cell restructuring procedure that relied on juxtaposing healthy cells (in this case, healthy skin cells) with the dead ones and something colloquially called "pixie dust" (made from pig tissue cells), which would then form a type of "scaffold" that would reactivate stem cells and force them into regrowing tissue. It was expensive and new, side effects had not yet been documented — but dammit, the Haupert-Collins were filthy rich and had already lost one family member. They weren't about to lose another.
John was shipped off to Florida, where his mother purchased a sprawling estate for himself, the in-care physicians and physical therapists, and the staff hired on to look after her son and his home. He started in on the treatment immediately, and results looked promising, if agonizingly slow. On the plus side, all the time spent in bed gave John time to reconsider wht he had been doing with his life up until that point, and to enroll in correspondence courses at the local university (and even, on his family's dollar, to have several of the professors come and personally lecture at his estate). He started hoarding books for an expansive library, most of which he's never read but likes to have around in place of people, and actually intending on making something of himself. But as the months dragged on and he remained multicolored and hairless over most of his body, hope dwindled. What could some deformed Quasimodo ever make of himself? He would live off the money his father left him and his stocks, become a recluse, maybe write some ~darque~ poetry when he got older. Months became years, and the estate fell into disrepair as John just stopped caring. He let himself go, dismissed most of the staff, stopped having professors come for tutoring. He took a year off university to wallow in angst, but has since returned, since his studies were about the only thing that made him feel normal. Very few students at the university even know he exists as more than some bizarre urban legend — that deformed guy who lives way the fuck out in that big ass mansion, doesn't he have a hunchback? One leg? No hair anywhere on his body like that Powder kid? Who knows. Point is, nobody's ever seen him, unless they happen to catch a glimpse of that weird guy in the gloves and cane sliding out of a limo into the hospital, and he prefers it that way. The fact that his name shows up as "Jean-Luc" on the KU network rather than "John" also helps him maintain his anonymity, and he's been known to lurk and jeer at the other students' escapades on it. Not that, you know, they'd ever know it was him. C'est la vie.
*This actually occurred in Texas, and a couple months ago rather than a couple years, but work with me here.
EXAMPLES.
FIRST PERSON:
Another fucking alligator on the grounds today. Swear to God, I'm going to have to fire the groundskeeper if this shit keeps up. All for loving nature and whatever, just not in my fucking garden. Or pool. Or garage. Mon Dieu, Good God, Mein Gott, etc. Jesus fucking Christ.
THIRD PERSON: My character, Rick, informs his pseudo-sort-of-girlfriend type person that, guess what! They're moving to Europe! ...Surprise!
FINISHED?
Is everything written, spellchecked, and proof-read? Great! E-mail your application to moc.liamg|domdomdom#moc.liamg|domdomdom with the subject of "Application for (INSERT CHARACTER CONCEPT HERE)" and we'll try to get back to you ASAP!
