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Post by Elijah de Abbith on Aug 12, 2007 20:32:30 GMT -5
The character.
Name Elijah Luke de Abbith
Nickname(s): N/A
Age: 34
Mutations/Abilities:
Major: Fire control.
Minors: Languages, night vision.
Face Claim: Matt Dallas.
Appearance: Elijah is almost the exact opposite of short and stocky. Standing at 6'6, he's leggy and skinny, the proud owner of a lean, bony frame. He's no body builder, and he shouldn't be. He's more conditioned for agility, jumping over fences and other things good for running from the law, and endurance. Some degree of strength and speed come with that, of course, but he definitely knows how to handle himself. There's little fat on him, virtue of a high metabolism and sporadic eating habits. He could certainly bear to gain some weight, and he almost definitely shouldn't lose any, but there's wiggle room as far as weight. If he got on a good schedule for eating and ate more and better food, he would definitely start to pack on the pounds. Obviously, he hasn't, and no one besides his mom would bother (and he's managed to convince her he's eating right), so he stays as is.
He has a handsome face, yes, but he doesn't shave enough and usually has a dark scruff of hair on his face. It's not five o' clock shadow, but he keeps it from becoming a full-out bear. His shaggy, scruffy black hair falls to about midway down his neck, and it's a pretty average cut. His bangs are swept away from his forehead and face, but there are typically a couple of strands loose. They're generally drifting about his face, and he just can't be bothered to brush them away. There are no other hints of color in his hair; it's just boring old black.
His eyes cannot decide what color they want to be. They look different, depending on the light and what he's wearing and most likely the alignment of the planets. Although they look light, silvery grey in bright light, they also look blue or green in other types of light. It's rather confusing, and he hates it when people ask him what color his eyes are because he's never dedicated time to figuring it out. They're the only part of him he can be sure is giving him away, because he has a tendency to keep his heart in his eyes. The easiest way to figure out how he's feeling to to look at them, but he knows about this aspect of his face, and he's become good at avoiding other's eyes when he wants to.
His clothing style is rather eclectic; maybe, if he feels like it, he'll wear a button-down shirt, but mostly he roams the school in a t-shirt and jeans, finished off by the pair of black sneakers he usually wears. It's guaranteed to drive the more formal members of the establishment nuts. If he has to, he'll wear the button-down shirt, maybe even button it up completely, and slacks. Ties of any sort and dress shoes are foreign to his wardrobe. He owns some, of course, but by that sure doesn't mean he likes to wear them.
He is a fire manipulator, and it's a given that he'll have a lighter or two somewhere on his person. It's just common sense and habit.
Family:
Keith de Abbith: Elijah's father. He lost track of the elder man when he went to Blackbriar, which is perfectly alright to him. Keith is a small-time artist, and an abusive alcoholic. Elijah and Max, the former especially, absolutely hate him. His dad had preferred Max simply because he was the eldest of the siblings, and finding out Elijah was a mutant and Max wasn't irritated him to no end.
Helena Kyriann: Elijah's mother. She's a famous interior designer, and she had to travel often. She was kept in the dark about her husband's abusive habits, until about a month after Elijah was sent to Blackbriar. She divorced her husband then and there, and still keeps in contact with the youngest of her sons. She doesn't really understand or care for mutants, but she tries to get along with Elijah nevertheless.
Max de Abbith: Elijah's brother, elder by six years. He majored in Computer Science, and now lives in Houston, Texas as the CEO of a smallish computer parts manufacturing company. After Elijah was born, he began attacking his younger sibling as a way to cope with his father's abusive behavior and gain some control over the situation. Elijah, obviously, hates him too.
Personal History Keith de Abbith and Helena Kyriann were nineteen when they met, both of them working for their degree in art at the same college. At first, they disliked each other; it was a first-impression thing. Keith was tall and powerfully built, the stereotypical Viking man with white-blond hair and blue eyes. Helena was of above-average height, with straight black hair, fair skin, and grey eyes, originating from a rich family that was pleased with her choice of profession and content to leave her be.
They had enough times during the day when they wound up interacting, though, that they began to like each other more. Finally, after a year of of friendship, Keith de Abbith asked her out. Roughly two years later, they were married at age twenty-three. Keith got his degree and got out of college, but Helena wanted to keep on in college. Keith didn't mind, as her parents would still be paying for her education, and they got an apartment together. They would live here until Helena graduated, and then, shortly after, they moved to New Jersey.
Helena worked as an interior designer, and became more and more famous, until finally she began to travel around the world. Keith stayed at home and worked from home as an artist, frustrated but content to see his wife when she got home. It was shortly after Helena went to London for a week, however, when a pregnancy test came back positive.
Both of them, now 28, were thrilled. They were well-established enough to be able to have a child, or maybe even children, and they got to their preparations almost immediately. Finally, on July 17th, Max Loki de Abbith was born- a gleeful, bouncing little boy with straight blond hair and grey eyes. For the first three years of his young life, all was well.
Helena started traveling more and more after that, until she was gone almost constantly. Keith fell into alcohol around then. It was easy for him to blame Max for his wife being gone so much, and the de Abbith child was being abused by his father. It was a disturbing new constant he tried to avoid, but simply couldn't. Their house was big, but not that big, and the child eventually came to accept it as normal. Whenever Helena de Abbith came home, her husband would stop for a few days before to let the marks fade, and cease as long as she was there. He was an abusive drunk, but he was a smart abusive drunk, and he cared for his wife too much to let her see what he was doing.
Shortly before Max's sixth birthday, another pregnancy test came back positive and the de Abbith house was swept up in the preparations for a new child. They decided to move to a larger house using the money Helena had acquired through her work, and did so. Then, December 17th, there was the latest addition to the family. Elijah Luke de Abbith, a black-haired, pale-skinned boy whose eyes never seemed to settle on a color.
The system repeated itself. For about two years Helena hung around to help take care of her children, and Keith grew more and more jealous of the love she gave both her children. Then, once more, she was going around the world again. Their father settled back into his abusive habits about two months after she went traveling again, except that this time Max had someone to vent on. Poor Elijah was having to deal with his elder brother and his father's abuse. The only things he had to keep his mind off it were music. In the band program at school, he played the trumpet, and he had managed to teach himself to play piano and guitar. He was able to coax a couple other people into teaching him the basics of their instrument,
Who knows how, but he had managed to avoid any regular sexual abuse. There were three or four incidents, at most, and most of them shortly before his powers manifested. His brother had gone off to college when he was twelve, and he didn't start to show that he was a mutant until he was about fifteen and a half, roughly six months after he hit puberty. His dad didn't find out about that until Elijah was seventeen, and for the next six months, the dark-haired teen would spend most of his time utterly miserable. Keith had always preferred Max, simply because he was the eldest, and that the youngest had wound up with those powers and his preferred son hadn't angered him to no end. Elijah had mostly been left to his own devices before this, allowed to make his own way to school and make his own meals and whatnot, but now his father was keeping a close eye on him, trying all he could to keep him from developing the powers any further without killing him.
One day, at school, Elijah heard of Blackbriar. He found out more about it, packed clothing, food, money, and some other necessities, and took off. Two months later, he was at Blackbriar, age eighteen. Shortly after he arrived, he discovered that, a month into his traveling to Alaska, his mother had divorced his father, and both he and Max had gone off to who knew where. He stayed at Blackbriar, graduated, and hung around the town for a few years. When he was twenty-six, though, he was gone again, deciding to travel around the world both to see the sights and pick up all the languages he could.
Four years later, he was back in Blackbriar, definitely different and maybe not for the better, as he showed up with the ever so well adjusted personality he has today. He had also done some more experimentation with drugs. While he had tried some in his teens and whatnot, he had had multiple chances to sample others off on his wanderings. He had a good deal of money from odd jobs around the world, something he refers to every so often, and he used it to buy himself an apartment and some furniture. In essence, he went from a lanky, sarcastic, slightly misanthropic twenty-six year old with a talent for music to an even more sarcastic, cynical thirty year old who definitely knew his way around, had began to learn to play several other instruments, both obscure and common, and had picked up an unholy amount of languages.
To this day, he lives in Blackbriar. Mostly, he does gigs around the town and whatever other random, good jobs he can find. He'll probably end up working at the school someday, though. He likes to hang out in and around the school, and it only makes sense for him to eventually get a job there. He knows most of the students by now, and several of the teachers. Basically, he's 'that tall guy who's always roaming around.'
Thus was the life of Elijah de Abbith.
Personality: It’s actually easy to select a few words to describe Elijah. Sarcastic. Ass. Temper. Misanthropic. You know. All the signs of a well-adjusted human being. He has a better side, but it’s hard to spot when it does show it’s face and it’s far happier lurking in the far corners of his brain. Sure, he’s lonely, but it’s not like he’s ever going to let anyone else see that. He’s not the easiest person to read unless you get a good look at his eyes, and he makes up for it by paying attention to everything and having probably been born with his PhD in understanding body language.
Sarcasm comes naturally to him. Innuendo and snark, plus a personality that makes talking to anyone who looks at him odd, or to large groups of people perfectly rational isn’t the easiest to deal with... actually, it’s nearly impossible and he proves it. A lot of people think his cold outer shell is endearing, and try to get to know him better. You know, they think he’s softer after a week or so, et cetera. He’s not. Unless he decides he likes you (which he won’t, the whole definition of ‘misanthropic’ is ‘doesn’t like anyone’), it will take a while. He’s social, but he doesn’t trust easily. Perfectly willing to meet new people, but new people aren’t perfectly willing to meet him. He’s very frustrating to get to know, and a few of the typical questions, especially the ones about his family and past, get him defensive and prickly fast. People who don't get the message when they ask about those subjects and he goes on the defensive irritate him to no end.
He says things without thinking sometime, although it doesn’t bother him much to give people a taste of reality or hurt their feelings. It’ll happen anyhow, he figures, so why shouldn’t it be him? He also has a temper. It’s only been helped by his job, the description of which includes “Deal with idiots”, but he still has it and it’s definitely around. He doesn’t care about being in situations where other people would get embarrassed, like yelling at people or doing things to purposefully embarrass them in public. As a rule, he’s not someone people like to annoy. That’s fine, too. He doesn’t like people in general, and he’s definitely cynical. He’s obviously not a hermit, but he doesn’t care at all for most of humanity.
School never treated Elijah well. His brain works radically differently from most people's. He's of above-average intelligence, certainly, but he would wind up having screaming arguments with his math teachers because he had already done the paper, in the completely 'wrong' way. Shortcuts. If they were out there, he was practically guaranteed to find them in school. He was horrible with his English and History classes, simply because of how they were. He really did best with Music and Art classes. P.E.... he just hated P.E. Enough said about that.
His talents lie in language, of course, and music. He can play piano, trumpet, and guitar, and he can coax tunes out of a few others, but not particularly well. He loves music, though. Always has. He still likes to listen to vinyl records, and there are few bands he listens to that were made within the last ten years. Languages are obviously something he's good at, and interesting to him. How many he speaks by now is a bit of an intimidating number; he spent a couple of years in his late twenties traveling around the world simply to pick up all the languages and dialects he could, and it worked pretty darn well. If he doesn't want anyone to understand something he says, he makes sure they won't. It's that simple.
He's naturally a rebellious person, and he genuinely doesn't care what other people think about him. Apparently, he just can't find it in him to care. He has his own opinions and views on the world, and he sticks to them. Elijah drives dominant control-freaks stark raving nuts; he's independent as a cat, harder to order around, and twice as slippery when he really wants to be. He likes to play around with people, and drive them basically up the wall. Obviously, this all comes with him having some degree of pride. He hates people seeing him in pain or upset; essentially, in any situation where he doesn't have control over himself.
The combination of fire manipulation, his gift with languages, and night vision tends to... annoy people, especially if he decides to play a prank. He's burnt things to ashes many a time, first at accident and later just to spite people or to amuse himself. It's almost ridiculously easy for him to get out of things by pretending he can't speak English, away from Blackbriar and the area surrounding. His night vision is another nifty trick, for obvious reasons, and he has basically found a way to utilize each of his powers. He also has a high tolerance for physical pain, something attained rather than genetic.
We wouldn’t want to give you the wrong impression, so onto his better side. He cares maybe a bit too much, although he's done a great job of hiding it from humanity. He’s horrible with words and saying what he thinks, and so people think he’s not sympathetic. Honestly, he isn’t. Elijah will be try to be empathetic though, and that matters a lot more to him personally than sympathy. People think he doesn’t care about anything, but he does. It’s simply not as easy to see. Any romantic in him, though, is gone, or more likely well-hidden. He’ll play music, because it keeps him quiet, but it smothers him to be quiet and polite and kind and gentlemanly. He would rather go to some bar or watch TV or just hang out, basically. He much prefers it to a nice fancy dinner or movie.
All in all, a frustrating, but interesting character.
Fears: Snakes, deep, dark water, clowns, being completely forgotten, amnesia, losing a hand.
Strengths: Ambidextrous; he can use both hands equally well. People often underestimate him because he looks like a hobo, which amuses him endlessly. He's smart and quick-witted, and able to defend himself verbally. Independent as can be and definitely able to think for himself, he also honestly doesn't care what other people think about him. You can see it in his posture and his style of dress and just everything about him.
He's certainly not incapable of physical defense, though. He learned more than languages on his trip around the world, definitely, and a few of the more important skills he picked up while doing not entirely legal things. He has a high tolerance for physical pain. Also, his height makes him a rather intimidating person. If he were 6'6 and skinny as a rail that would be one thing, but in this case, he's 6'6 and well-built. His powers are also, obviously, another strength.
Weaknesses: He thinks differently, but maybe too differently. He jumps around ideas a lot and leaves people in the dust, and he has odd spikes of creativity, during which he tends to get anxious and fidgety if he can't get at some sort of instrument. He's very hard to get along with, for obvious reason. His personality is just a whole great big ball of thorns, all flaws and sharp wit. He hates snakes with all his heart and soul. To be specific, he's absolutely terrified of them, to the point of panic attacks. He's been freakishly observant for most of his life, and it gets annoying as heck when someone is able to guess how you're feeling or where you've been or anything from a couple moment's observation, and he's hardly subtle about it. It's even more annoying when he decides to spout off his findings, be you in a crowded hallway, a nice restaurant, or anywhere else. He's also rather easily distracted.
Physically, he's too scruffy to be particularly attractive, especially when there are all those other clean-shaven males with nice, kind personalities to be had. At his height, he also tends to bumps into things often.
Extra: Owns a black and silver German Shepherd named Riley.
You.
Alias: Rachel
Experience: Three years.
How’d you hear about us? I was cool enough to get invited. Chyeah.
Other: None of the bands I listen to the most on iTunes were formed within the last ten years. Amazing how such a small thing can make you feel old, neh?
Role playing Sample
((It's Elijah the Doctor! Yay!))
Lunchtime. It was the one time of the day when Elijah, also known as Dr. de Abbith, was allowed to have a break from his job without his boss breathing down his neck. It was a time to come tearing into their cafeteria, buy himself a couple of sandwiches, eat them both at disturbing speed, and then beg food from anyone else in the cafeteria. Yes, lunch was a fun time for Dr. de Abbith.
Now was not lunch time.
Beep beep beep, BA beep BEEP, beeep... 164 pounds of rogue doctor reclined in the chair next to the hospital bed. His long legs were stretched out in front of him, heels set next to the leg of an elderly man. A white labcoat fell away from the aforementioned limbs to flutter in front of the chair. A light green button-down shirt, the first couple of buttons undone to show a black tee beneath it, finished the ensemble. It was perhaps a bit too casual for most doctors. Most of the others had dress shoes, slacks, shirts buttoned up, ties. They were clean-shaven, with clean haircuts and clean shoes and obvious care for their appearence. Look at us, they said, we are professional!
Most people though that Elijah said Careful, I'm running from the law!
It honestly wasn't his fault. It was just how he was. He wasn't formal, he didn't shave enough, his hair was allowed to roam wild over his skull, and his eyes may have been focused on something different, but they were almost definitely watching you. Quite the scruffy vagabond, our Dr. de Abbith. No one liked him, though. He was too sarcastic, his temper was too wild, he was just too frustrating... all sorts of reasons. Maybe that was why he sought company in the coma patients. Who knows? Right now, he was mostly busy hiding from his boss and amusing himself. Thumbs working away at the white DS Lite, he rambled away at the man.
"Music nowadays sucks though, don't you think? It's all rap and hiphop and country and god only knows what else. Hell, it's like no one listens to The Who or The Rolling Stones or U2 or any of the other bands that were popular a long time ago but aren't now! Not many people even seem to know about Nirvana! Hell, there are probably kids who don't know about The Beatles! He paused to let that sink in, beeping away at his DS even as he spoke. The coma man seemed unmoved, so he continued. "They're all listening to... to... Emimem and... whoever else! If they aren't preppy or 'gangsta', they're noncomformist, just like everyone else," he ranted. The coma man was a tough audience, though, and actually seemed to be ignoring him. Fine then, Elijah decided, I just won't talk to you!
He was content with that course of action, and settled in for a good brood. There was, he felt, a difference between brooding and sulking. It wasn't easy to explain, but it was there. He sulked in public, and he would brood in private. Right now, he was brooding. In a few minutes, he would probably be ranting away again at coma guy... make that less than a minute. Anyone who were to walk in at that point would have heard a lusty and exceedingly lewd commentary on actresses.
Kids these days. |
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