Post by Noah Lawrence on Aug 14, 2007 21:01:53 GMT -5
[/color]The character.
Name:
Noah Isaac Lawrence
Nickname(s):
None, although someone could call him everything from NoNo the Hobo to Twerp to the Bodacious Booty and he wouldn’t protest… out loud.
Age:
Twenty years old
Mutations/Abilities:
Major
sing me a song ;; Actually, Noah doesn’t know about his major power, which is pretty ridiculous, considering where he is. However, his voice happens to be his real ability, although there’s nothing special about his normal st-st-stuttering talking voice: it’s his singing that is key. Much like the Pipedream power, Noah could make another person sleepy or stun them with his voice, but can also manipulate others with his melodies, but they can break free of his hold with enough willpower. He doesn’t know how to control people by singing yet, obviously, since he doesn’t even know that his voice is anything exceptional.
Minor
la chameleon ;; As useless a power as turning purple or green would have to be granted to a guy like Noah that thinks he is completely useless, right? Noah can change the colors of his skin, clothes, hair, and eyes to blend into the background, but there’s a catch. It’s like in a video game when you pick up a cloaking device and run around with it, but you look slightly shiny or something against the background and are really easy to see if your opponent is paying attention and not being a dunderhead. All in all, completely useless.
flower power ;; Oh, powers over plants is cool, right? Right? Wrong. Noah does not have the ability to control plants; he has the ability to control flowers. And not even thorny flowers. He can’t make them grow to massive proportions and stomp around a city. Really, the most he can do with his flower powers [hah] is put life into dead blooms or to make a flower blossom out of nowhere without water, sunlight, or soil.
Face Claim:
Ryan Taylor
Appearance:
For his age, Noah has an abnormally young face. Most people would assume that he is sixteen or seventeen because of that face of his, and he will probably need to have his ID out any time he walks into a bar when he finally gets to a legal drinking age. Some things that contribute to that adolescent appearance are: that softly rounded, boyish shape of his head, even if his jaw has been strengthening with age as of late; his smooth forehead, not already having faintly defined lines of shock marring the skin from several different instances of astonishment that one would experience in life; that very light freckling upon his nose, which will make anyone appear young as long as they aren’t old enough to have age spots; the way his eyes look too large when he smiles, or even sometimes seem too twinkling to possibly fit someone who has to support his own self with a job; and even that smile of his, though the reason that it is so useful doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Plus, with that scrawny body of his, Noah could be a just-barely-reaching-maturity teen, without the muscles of adulthood having set in already.
Just because Noah has a boyish face, that doesn’t mean it can’t deserve description beyond that, so there are to the more neutral features—ones that neither point towards him being sixteen or twenty but merely sit there looking as pretty as he is.
Okay, hair isn’t exactly a facial feature, but it deserves some notice. The strands of cells sprouting from Noah’s head are of a sort of natural silkiness—actually, he uses good shampoo and conditioner—and, now that he is in Alaska, are almost either a medium or light brown. Once upon a time, the sun would set the vaguest of blonde highlights in his hair, although this was only if he spent a huge amount of time outside. Noah’s hair grows at an ungodly swift rate, and almost requires a fresh cut every month, though he will let his hair get extremely long and shaggy before wasting money cutting it. When his head is not overflowing with too much hair to deal with, Noah usually wears it just short enough to not hang down over his eyes, but would hate to have a buzz cut or anything reminiscent of chopping off his hair completely. After his bangs fall over his eyes, he actually does go to the barber to keep from wandering off of a cliff if a strand of hair blows into his corneas.
Those ears of his are neither too large nor too small for Noah’s head, and do not stick out and serve to make him look like an elephant or a severely inbred hillbilly, which is all you can ever ask from ears, really. No sort of piercing adorns his lobes or the cartilage above them, just as no piercing could be found anywhere else on Noah’s body.
Noah’s eyebrows are set in a pretty straight line above his eyes unless he is making a face of some sort, and are just thick enough to help him in looking expressive and to subtract from the times when he can look girly. By ‘just thick enough’, it is obvious that they are not ‘man-bushy’ eyebrows that have the look of someone shoving a fat, furry caterpillar on another person’s face and calling it an eyebrow. He doesn’t have a pair of wiggling caterpillars up there over his eyes, for sure.
Depending on the amount and type of lighting in an area, Noah’s eyes will change colors, although they almost always are some combination of blue, such as blue-green, blue-gray, blue-green-gray, etc. On the rare occasion, Noah’s eyes will chance to appear to be green-gray instead of some form of blue, but that is only in very special conditions.
Like the rest of his face, Noah’s eyes are expressive, and reflect his emotions like some mirror into his soul, much to his own displeasure. Generally they are sort of distant and unheeding, as if they wouldn’t give a guy the time of day (which they couldn’t, not having vocal cords or a clock) if he asked, not from rudeness, but because they wouldn’t notice someone talking to them (which they wouldn’t, since they don’t have ears or even a brain to register things in); at times, they will glint with fear, or, rarest of all, soften to a comforting sort of expression.
Neither ‘gaunt’ nor ‘chubby’ could be words used to describe Noah’s cheekbones, for, though they are set high in his face, they do not stick out so far or have skin so tightly stretched across them to give him the appearance of having a hollow inside of his head, and though his face is filled out evenly from his cheeks to his chin, there is certainly not enough baby fat on Noah’s face to be pulled into a roll of it as chubby cheeks could accomplish without causing him extreme discomfort, similar to the feeling of your skin being ripped from your flesh. All in all, Noah’s cheeks are of pretty average proportions, although they are starting to lean over to the ‘gaunt’ end of the scale.
Noah’s nose is, quite frankly, ordinary. The bridge of his nozzle leads on to a curving slope that runs down into a slight bump at the tip which, if one were really small and driving down his nose, would be a road hazard. His nostrils are nothing extraordinary, not slits but not gaping holes in his face which he could stick a dime or, perhaps, a quarter. Except for the fact that he has the (not) useful ability to flare his nostrils to double their usual size and suck them in so that the outsides presses into the inner cartilage of his nose, keeping some small amount of water from emitting into his nostrils when swimming, they aren’t worth much other reference.
Set the appropriate distance beneath his nostrils are, of course, Noah’s lips. His top lip and his bottom lip are of about an equal size, and are the same pale pink color, so as to serve in not making him look like some patchwork freak. Noah’s lips are certainly not thin, but they are also not exactly pouting, though he could pull off a pout a whole lot easier than he could a thin line of severity. These lips of his are generally not pulled into a smile or a frown, a grin or a grimace, but are more often than not just… straight and expressionless. Sometimes the very corner of his lips will turn up or down depending on his mood, but these movements can be hard to notice. If Noah was really, genuinely happy, he would use his real smile, which is actually bright and attractive for being used so little; he would similarly grimace if he was ever truly upset.
There is very little to say about Noah’s chin other than that it is relatively thin and rounded rather than being sharp or strong. The end of his head is just the right amount of space away from the end of his lips to suit his facial structure.
From his chin and jaw extends Noah’s neck, which is not thickly muscled and does not have a pulsing vein throbbing on the side of it that just screams ‘cut me’ (really, it doesn’t), but is sort of thin—not too thin, though. His Adam’s apple is noticeable against the sinewy muscles on his neck, and the length of this section of vertebrae leads to sloping shoulders that aren’t exactly large and strong as most other men’s shoulders. His collarbone stands out sharply against his slender body.
That collarbone leads to his pectoral muscles, which are of course not really muscular enough to be considered ‘muscles’. From there we move on to the not-well-defined abdominal muscles, and—well, you get the point.
Noah is lean and lanky much the way the stem of an iris would be, ‘cause, y’know, every boy dreams of being compared to a flower. Noah does not look his height of 6’3” when he is not standing next to a shorter person, but his limbs are long, though they find a way to fit his torso. He has slender hips and—finally—well-muscled, slim legs underneath them, since he spends so much time wandering around that he would have to gain something to show it.
As for fashion, Noah only ever wears pants and long-sleeved shirts, sweaters, hoodies, jackets, or coats. Being that he is in Alaska, this obviously makes a whole lot of sense, but Noah even bundled up in Nebraska. He doesn’t have much body fat to keep him warm and, much like a flower dies in winter’s bitter chill, he has a very low tolerance for frigid weather and gets cold easily. It is a rare occurrence to see Noah in any short-sleeved shirts, and that would signify that it was pretty warm weather. Beyond the whole warm clothes issue, Noah likes to wear very casual clothing, and has his own sort of unique style; which is to say, he finds shirts with really weird logos on them in who-knows-where, and then wears them regularly.
(Yada yada yada.)
Family:
Mother - Ayette Iris Lawrence - A beautiful woman even in her middle age, the last time that Noah saw her, Ayette had curly, dark red hair and blue eyes. From her early twenties onward, she tired of things easily, and so was always bringing different men home on different occasions in order to entertain her, always changing the man on the next day. She was the type of women that could get away with such things, because she had a tinkling laugh and a soothing tone and never looked a hair out of place. Noah never had anything even vaguely resembling a father figure in his youth because of his mother’s habits. His mother was all he had, though, and he loved her despite all else.
Father - The name escapes… - Noah knows nothing about his father other than that he has one and he would have to be a mutant. Only one thing is assumable beyond the mutant deal, and that is that his father had, somewhere in his family, someone with brown or black hair, because Noah’s mother came from a long line of fair- and red-haired people.
Personal History:
As sad to say as it is, Noah was nothing but a lovechild between his mother, who slept with random strangers when bored, and some anonymous mutant. At least, he assumes that it was a mutant; could he receive the mutant gene from anyone else? His mother was never even sure of the name of his father, or what he looks like, or anything else. She probably didn’t know his name to begin with.
On the day that Noah was born, there was chaos in the hospital. No, the chaos was not because of some school bus that crashed or some bike race that ended badly or some riot in the streets that ended in hundreds injured. The chaos was Noah.
Well, okay, there were no problems in the rest of the hospital and most places ran just as smoothly, but the maternity ward was all aflutter with confusion and worry.
The thing is, Noah was born purple.
Absolutely healthy in all ways except for the whole color issue, no one could figure out what exactly had transpired in Ayette’s womb that would turn the boy purple. His breathing was fine, so it wasn’t a lack of oxygen. Nothing was wrong with his skin cells, and when a sample was taken off of his body, the cells returned to a natural color immediately. He didn’t have some weird violet rash.
No one had ever heard of a case quite like this, and it was perplexing, to say the least.
After a stressful night of wondering what would happen and how they would rescue the newborn from a life of solitude due to his purple condition, Noah suddenly regained a natural color, the same skin tone any other baby could have.
The hospital workers released him and his mother in bewilderment, and he was taken home to Ayette's apartment, where he would be living for the next twelve years.
From infancy to childhood there were no further issues to deal with and nothing interesting enough to mention other than Ayette’s continued sexual activities. It wasn’t until Noah was a playful little ten-year-old that he realized that he could make flowers sprout with his mind. This he discovered while running around the apartment complex’s yard one day. From making a tulip bud on the ground, he forced an apple tree to burst into full bloom, all in the dead of winter, of course. When his mother and all of the other tenants came home that night, they thought they were going insane.
What, with all of the color-changing and flower-sprouting going on, Ayette was at her wit’s end by the time that Noah was nearing his twelfth birthday. She was so completely exhausted because of him, in fact, that she didn’t even have the energy to bring hoards of men home with her, and so Noah’s eleventh year of life was pretty calm, being just about the last period of time that wasn’t at least semi-hectic.
A few months after Noah turned twelve, Ayette finally snapped under the pressure of having a child with weird mutant abilities that were potentially dangerous—or maybe potentially gay, considering those flower powers—and decided to alert the authorities. This was just before the time in which the government got all “omggg death to mutantssss”, so it wasn’t exactly a chemical warfare kind of deal, but it was enough to get people in the near vicinity riled up. So, one day when Noah was headed back home from middle school and skipping merrily—or actually just walking, but the skipping makes him sound more innocent and cheerful—he was forced to stop when he saw a gathering of infuriated people in front of the apartment building.
An angry mob after a harmless twelve-year-old?
Yeah, well, humans are pretty stupid.
Fortunately enough for him (but not for the mob of bloodlust-filled twits), Noah was able to cloak himself just enough to kinda sorta blend into the background and hightail it out of there. From his childhood home he moved on to the park; hell, he didn’t have anywhere else to go. In the dead of night when the crowd had shuffled out in disappointment, Noah returned to see how his mother fared, but found that the apartment was left untouched since he had left in the morning. It turns out that Ayette caught wind of the throng of people on her doorstep and decided to live at some boyfriend’s house for a little while, of course without caring what happened to her freaky son.
Next in Noah’s life was to find a new home, considering the fact that he didn’t have the cash to pay for rent or extra organs to spare if someone happened to send a pitchfork through his spleen. This temporary residence he could find in a hollowed-out tree in the park, and he could spend the rest of his days until he was legally old enough to work hunting squirrels and fishing and eating berries. …Well, he might have been able to do that.
By some sad stroke of fate, it turned out that the park rangers did nightly patrols of the area and booted out anyone who happened to be loitering around in dead oaks.
Plan A having failed miserably, Noah decided to be resourceful and use his special gift to sell flowers that he made at a street corner. Being that twelve-year-olds weren’t exactly reliable florists and the kid didn’t own the corner that he sold his blooms on or even have a store-owning permit or anything like that, this strategy was also bound to be unsuccessful.
Actually, he never sold a single flower in the few days, but got a few sandwiches from random passerby to keep himself from starving on the side of the street and being an eyesore to the community. However, an extraordinary event happened and Fate decided to smile upon Noah…
Okay, maybe it wasn’t so extraordinary.
And maybe that smile was a bit more like a grimace.
A very odd man happened by, looking like some weird sailor type that was swept straight off of the sea to Montana. That must have been one hell of a gust of wind.
The old man in particular had stark-white hair, a wooden peg-leg (what was he, a pirate?), one brown eye and one electric blue eye, and such a sour expression on his face that anyone would have thought that he had just taken a swig of milk so old that it had chunks floating in it. That probably wouldn’t have been too far off of the mark. Half of his face was scrunched to the side, one lip tugging at his cheek muscles so much that his nose seemed to twist in the wrong direction, and with one of his eyes half-shut, so that he squinted at Noah through one wide brown eye and one squinting blue eye.
The conversation went something like the following:
“Brat! Where do you get these flowers?” Squint, squint, squint.
“I m-make them myself.” Smiles and such.
“You grow them? You live on the side of the street, boy! It’s snowing out here. How would you keep a plant alive out here?” Glare through one eye, crack of the neck.
“I don’t n-need w-warm weather to grow flowers. H-Here, I’ll show you.” Insert random sprouting of a bloom out of the strange man’s coat pocket.
“OH MY LORD.” Wow, he has two eyes.
“S-Sir?” Concern. Maybe.
“There’s a place for people like you boy!” Spitting on the ground. Maybe he ate something nasty. “You ought to get going to Alaska. There’s no telling what could happen to you down here with the Human Project around.” Was that a threat?
“H-Human Project?” Blink, blink.
“What are you, challenged?” Resume squinting. “Never mind! Get yerself to Blackbriar, now!”
“H-How am I g-going to…” Dramatic trail off.
“Get on out of my sight!”
“B-but sir, I—“
“GIT!”
At which time Noah skedaddled.
So, with all the magic powers that be (actually Noah returned to the PMSing sailor-guy, asked how he was going to get to Blackbriar, Alaska, and received both a plane ticket and a swift kick to the bottom in reply from the now-seemingly-wealthy benefactor), Noah ended up in this new town.
It wasn’t until he had looked around the place a bit and listened in on some conversations (curse that habit) that he realized that he was in a town that was actually founded on the principle of being a safe haven for mutants. That was… odd. He had never met another mutant in his life, so he obviously wasn’t expecting to find thirty just hanging around in the streets, all in one place. He got over the shock though, since he was only twelve and had a short attention span.
In Blackbriar, Noah was treated a bit better than he was back home, but not by much. Meaning: while he did not make friends or get noticed by most people, no angry mobs formed to burn him at the stake and stab him in the liver with their farming implements. That’s a step in the right direction, certainly.
By the time he had gotten to the city, though, Noah was content with being widely ignored, and over time grew to hate not being ignored, as he does today. Y’see, back before he hit puberty, Noah wasn’t exactly eye candy.
For his first year in Blackbriar, Noah stayed shut up in a room in the Silver Wolf Tavern, which he paid for with a few bills that the sailor-dude slipped him along with the plane ticket. When he got halfway through his cash supplies, he decided that he would apply for the school there, which he by some weird miracle got into. Once he turned thirteen, he was sorta-not-really attending the academy, since he was too young to actually go to classes there. They just sort of took pity on him and let him stay in the apartments.
Blah, blah, blah, a few more years of his life passed that were not worthy of mention. He didn’t really have any major drama through his time in Blackbriar.
During the warmer starlit nights, Noah would stray from his home and go out to sleep at the border of Elkwood Forest, just because he is suicidal/moronic enough to go out somewhere that has rumors of death and disappearances stamped all over it. He got to know the first few trees of the woodlands pretty well, and sometimes ventured into it, but never during the day (he really is crazy or something), so he never got to see the pretty sights very well.
Now Noah is twenty years old, and he is basically a hermit—not a crab, since, well, he doesn’t carry a shell on his back, but a reclusive person—and every year he seems to get more withdrawn. Maybe it’s being in the presence of so many gifted individuals and having about the most ludicrously pathetic powers ever.
Yeah, that’s probably it.
Noah is due for another change of pace, definitely.
Personality:
If there were an animal to be used to symbolize Noah, it would not be the wily fox or the haughty cat, nor any other animal that earns much notice. He would be a turtle; timid, quiet, and easily frightened into its shell.
If there was a pair of trousers that symbolized Noah, they would not be denim or cotton, but instead corduroy. Corduroy clothing, on a whole, is a very old sort of style, and doesn’t earn much respect. Corduroy is simply not gangsta’.
If there was a country that could symbolize Noah, it would not be the technologically advanced Japan or the oh-so-powerful United States. It would be Sweden. After all, is Sweden ever really acknowledged? Sweden is the third largest country in Europe, a very modern, liberal society, and people barely know the difference between the Swedish and the Swiss.
If there were a…
Well, you see where I’m going with this.
Noah is definitely the shy type and hates for people to notice him in any way. If ever there were a man who would much rather be a wall than a person, he would be Noah. When eyes are turned towards him, he cowers and shakes as if being gazed at burns him, or else he tries to conceal himself behind something: a desk, a door, a hood. Oftentimes he acts like he is some hideous thing that should not be looked upon for its ugliness, although he is very far from that.
Noah’s introversion could probably be credited mostly to his low self-esteem, for he is to the point where he doesn’t try to prove himself anymore, but just tries to not draw attention to his many flaws. Partly, though, he is just bashful by nature and likes neither large crowds nor small crowds.
There is nothing Noah likes quite as much as absolute quiet, which he gets a lot when he wanders away from everyone else around Blackbriar, Silence is a rule that Noah lives by, and he doesn’t speak to anyone without their prompting, as he would usually have nothing to say anyway. However, he was taught to reply if someone happened to speak to him first, so he also abides by that set of instructions. If, by some miserable stroke of fate, he is asked a question, Noah cannot help but stutter when he answers, which can only serve to give him more grief later on, but he never ignores the inquirer.
Because he is so adept at shrinking into the background, people do not often take notice of Noah despite his pretty face, which is good for him. Besides turning in whatever work or being glanced at while the attendance list is being checked, not even teachers really pay attention to Noah. He is like some inanimate object placed in the background: you may notice that he’s there, but other than that… nothing.
Quite a few things that Noah is capable of he hides from people, not because he thinks that they are inferior to him and don’t deserve to see whatever he can do or something like that, but because he doesn’t realize that anything he can do is beautiful, or that any opinion he could have would be wise. For example, when he is alone, Noah will create various flowers in the ice, testing his flower powers, but squashes them before anyone else can see. He will also sing to himself softly, but only when no one is around to hear, which might be the reason that he doesn’t know what his voice can do. If, when he is listening to a conversation between two other people (which he does often without exactly meaning to), he thinks anything of the topic, he doesn’t raise his voice to tell the conversers his idea even if it would be good to follow.
On his own, when talking to himself, Noah doesn’t stutter; he also does not stutter when singing.[/blockquote][/size]
This is also why I don’t write when I’m listening to songs like Banana Phone. Also, I’m leaving tomorrow for America, but I’ll hopefully be back in a couple of days if no one in my family spazzes and chucks the laptop at a wall.
