OUT OF CHARACTER INFORMATION.
NAME: Rian.
AGE: 21!
TIME ZONE: Arizona.
CONTACT INFORMATION: caraway1914 (AIM), moc.liamg|4091yawarac#moc.liamg|4091yawarac
PREVIOUS EXPERIENCE: You can link to past journals, games, and threads or a compilation journal!
IN CHARACTER INFORMATION.
DISNEY CHARACTER: Clopin, The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
NAME: Luka Rankin (Real name is Mikael, but that's only used among the Roma).
AGE / BIRTHDATE: 20/Feb. 15. ONE DAY OFF, HE IS ALWAYS FORGOTTEN.
SEXUALITY: Heterosexual, but only out of necessity. Girls are trouble, man. Except, you know, for looking.
BIRTHPLACE: Whitestone, Queens, New York.
YEAR: Sophomore. He's a year behind.
MAJOR: General Business. Not that that means anything.
EXTRACURRICULARS: W-Dis Student Broadcasting Assocation, radio sector~. That's…it.
CURRENT RESIDENCE: Fantasia Gardens. For a shitty ass little housing unit, Luka keeps it remarkably clean, if not terribly organized; at least, not by conventional standards. He has no problems finding whatever he needs in the mess, even if no one else can.
APPEARANCE: Luka is a skinny sort of guy, his limbs too long, his body too thin to be really attractive. He's lean and strong, but a little too flexible, and not nearly manly enough to get the sort of looks the footballers and other athletes get. His hair is shaggy brown, his skin ruddy, his lips just a tad too full (let me tell you, boy can work a pout). Still, he walks with a swagger and an easy grin that make him bizarrely handsome — or rather, appealing, as he's pretty adamant about keeping the ladies at bay. You know, if they ever come calling. It happens. He favors loose, out-of-fashion suits, porkpie hats, and shoes that seem to be a size too big. He's also never seen without his zippo and a pack of smokes. What's a man without a nasty habit, anyway?
PLAYED BY: Trent Ford.
PERSONALITY:
Luka was raised on a number of morals and ethics that differ pretty strongly from conventional systems, but having been mixed in with white folk since he was young, he's got an odd mix of the two. He's not particularly bad or amoral, and certainly won't be running around kicking puppies and stealing candy from babies. Still, selling drugs to white folks and beating the crap out of people who harrass his family? That's a-ok in his book. While he understands gadje laws and that transgressing them is probably bad, he's been brought up completely centered around his family. In the end, it's protecting them and keeping things straight with them that counts.
He's a relatively loose adherant of marimé customs — the things Roma people count as dirty or sinful — mostly because you can't get by in university if you shun every girl you pass not covered from the waist down (of course, there's nothing wrong with a nice pair of tits). He quietly keeps his community's ways, but has adapted himself somewhat to manage in a wholly white society. He focuses on general interaction rather than ~opening up~ his people to gadje outsiders: Roma have to keep their ways pure, after all. No point in going around blabbing them to every white kid with a speck of curiosity. Instead, Luka entertains. He comes from a long line of musicians and entertainers, and, being an adaptable sort, has molded that into a modern troubador of sorts: he has a popular radio show, is prone to the theatric and loud, and knows just about every damn thing that happens on the KU campus, for the purposes of regurgitating later with flair. If it weren't for his insistence on flirting (cover for being a little terrified of what diseases white girls could give him? YOU DECIDE), one might think he was a little feygele.
Still, he's cheeky and amusing, vastly preferring keeping a good mood to anything else. If it involves taking the piss out of someone — anyone, really, right down to himself — so be it. In fact, that's probably the best way to go about it, which means Luka has something of a reputation for being a serial teaser. It's all in good fun, though; he just doesn't let much get to him. The only thing that ever really riles him up, unsurprisingly, is fucking with his family — and even then, he tends to carry out retribution with a somewhat terrifying grin. Oho sociopathy, I see you there.
He's unsurprisingly secretive while still being friendly; charming in a wrong-side-of-the-tracks kind of way (though you'll never catch him in a leather jacket or dating a girl in a poodle skirt). While he has no qualms about selling coke or talking shit for the sake of a laugh, he's strangely adept at reading people and, more importantly, letting people decide for themselves ~what makes a monster and what makes a man~. Close relationships (and similarly, guilt, which comes right along with letting people get close) are sort of beyond him — he'll be out of Florida in two years anyway — but he does have a string of pretty loyal followers/drug addicts, and that suits him just fine.
LIKES: Magic tricks, his mother's cooking, getting the full asking price, telling stories, frat boys looking to buy roofies, his people, his cheap ass car, gymnastics. :|
DISLIKES: Preachy people, two-faced people (he doesn't count himself, of course), shitty transmissions, weird European people, rich bastards too high on their morality horse to help a brother out, when girls talk about being on their period because HOLY CHRIST DOES NOT WANT.
HISTORY:
To understand Luka Rankin, one must first have a basic understanding of Roma culture. Their rules and beliefs are complicated and convoluted, made doubly so by any lack of written resources from the Roma themselves and the differing degrees of isolation each community takes to separate themselves from the non-Roma gadje — anyone who isn't Roma, basically. First and foremost, their entire society is based on a strict belief in the clean and unclean: marimé. To keep things general, most anything non-Roma is considered marimé, simply by virtue of being able to pollute the old Roma ways. Roma are exceptionally careful about keeping their culture separate and distinct from gadje ways, which makes living with the gadje — well, difficult. They don't want integration, but they do want respect and equality, which will never happen if they keep themselves closed off and ~mysterious~.
Which, as it turns out, is something Luka understood from a young age. Bouncing from city to city, wherever the adults of his community could find work, it became readily apparent he wasn't like the other boys, and it (unfortunately) wasn't due to some awesome mutation or toxic waste spill that would give him bamf Wolverine-like abilities. Someone called his dad a baby-stealer, which didn't make much sense to him, since he already had five brothers and sisters and his dad complained about having too many mouths to feed. Why would he want more? Then someone threw fruit at his younger sister on their way out of a small farming town, and later that year, they were denied permits to park their campers on public land. The only answers he got from the family were ones about the unclean gadje, and how it was better they kept away. His father forbade him to ask more; sacrilegious, he said. Don't act marimé, don't be marimé.
This was pretty acceptable well into Luka's teens. For a Roma clan, his community was relatively modernised, and almost all the children went to a gadje public school to learn reading, writing, and arithmetic. But once they were done with the required years — in fact, in some cases, even before graduation — the Roma children went right back to their camps to start in on work with their mothers and fathers. The gadje skills they learned went to furthering the family business — auto sales, perhaps, or general home repair. Luka? Not so much.
It was radio that got him. The older kids always had radios around the campers wherever they went, and Luka couldn't deny that there was a certain charm to the gadje djs. They were loud, they were gregarious, they got people's attention. For the kid who couldn't get enough of the limelight, you bet your ass this grabbed him and didn't let go.
Of course, getting a 15-year-old onto the gadje radio wasn't on the family's agenda, and bouncing from city to city was not very conducive to Luka's plans of fame and fortune. Luka redirected his energies into forming something of a reputation: it wasn't so much that he had a name that followed him everywhere, but more that within days of resettling into an area, people just knew Luka — and, in general, liked him. He wasn't on the radio, but he was often in the limelight. From high school to high school, he had a slew of friends that seemed to materialize in his wake, and then return to whatever cliques they might have been in when he left. He likely would have ended up a theatre kid, if so much of it wasn't so blatantly marime (do you see some of the costumes the girls wear?).
He graduated public school with a few other kids from his community, and soon after made the difficult choice to move into the gadje world for a university education. He wouldn't be gajo unless he renounced his Roma heritage, but it was still shaky territory. Living away from the community, not moving around as the seasons changed and work made itself available, not having daily contact with his family, being up close and personal — and potentially sullied — by gajo students and their families. But Luka was a smart boy and his family relatively modern, so he applied for scholarship after scholarship after scholarship, and with an extra year of hard labor in Miami, he had enough saved up to just squeak by at Kingdom University — close enough to where his family was currently camped to see them regularly, but far enough away they couldn't constantly be looking over his shoulder at all his marime friends. They allowed him to major in business so he might come back and help the clan after graduation (maybe buying out the used car dealership his father worked at), and he was soon interning at the school radio station. He's now worked his way up to his own show in the 9 pm slot, which has a pretty steady following, even if everyone still regards him a little sketchily. The fact he started drug running last year doesn't help dispute his fringe-of-society reputation either. It's all small time stuff — some pot, E, the occasional 8-ball — but as the radio show only satisfies his entertainer's streak and not his wallet, man needed to make some cash. And hey, what does he care, right? He's not doing any of them like some marime gajo with too much money to blow. And really, that's what counts.
SAMPLES.
FIRST PERSON: Gather round, gather round, you princes of college, you kings of central Florida. It's good news tonight — a double header in a barely constrained blouse! It seems our friendly Delta Zeta ladies have lost themselves in yet another ill-advised pep rally. Whoops. That's right, boys and girls, you lucky few are privy to the delightful secondhand remembrances of long-lost love, of ill-fated turns, of the purity that can only be found in the lost top of a sorority girl.
No, Luka, you don't believe it, you say? Well, well, my friends. To combat your inevitable claim, pics or it didn't happen — I see you there, gamers, and your lusting index fingers poised over the scrolling buttons on your mouses — I do, in fact, have most glorious photographic evidence. Now, being a man of upstanding valor and nigh unshakable morals, I can't simply tell you who it was or post it for all to see. What sort of man would I be if I did that? Think of the souls crushed, the lives sent topsy-turvy. No, no. We can't have that.
However, I am a man who understands needs, and should any of you poor, unfortunate souls require some counseling to get through the heartache of missing Samantha Gerber's unassailable tits —
Would you look at that. I've said too much.
THIRD PERSON: IF YOU NEED ANOTHER, I WILL GIVE YOU ONE.
FINISHED?
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