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[03 Jan 2012|12:15pm] |
In Character
FULL NAME: Casper Quentin Crane
NICKAME/ALIAS: Cas, Ghost, Q, Cusie (a bastardization of "Q" and "C" that his mother found amusing)
CURRENT AGE: 25
DATE OF BIRTH: March 17th
PLACE OF BIRTH: Toulouse, France (although just barely, as his parents were boarding a plane at the time)
MARITAL STATUS: Single
SEXUALITY: Kinsey 2
OCCUPATION: Linguist
PARENTS: Clémance (neé Gilbert) and John Crane
SIBLINGS: N/A
Physical Appearance
HEIGHT, WEIGHT: 5'8'' 138 lbs
Casper is your stereotypical scholarly type: he's got short, messy brown hair, skin pale from lack of sunlight, ever-present glasses, and rather scrawny build bedecked with generally unfashionable clothes. He lives in his head mostly in his head, so he tends not to give too much thought to his appearance.
DISTINGUISHING MARKS: He prefers glasses to contacts, so he's usually wearing them.
Personality & Demeanor
Logical, efficient and goal-oriented, Casper Crane is a hard worker and an ambitious person. He is also, however, deeply compassionate, although it usually takes a little longer for that side to show, particularly because he's so frustratingly judgmental. Because he is used to being walked all over by spirits, he is rather shy and introverted, and although he can work well with others, being around people for too long simply exhausts him. He plays his emotions very close to the chest and if personal issues come up in conversation, he is likely to change the subject. He is also very rules oriented; he does well with a framework and a routine and can operate very well inside any set of rules you tend to give him. This, coupled with his logical-but-creative bent, makes him a focused and efficient problem solver. Despite his awkwardness and total failure at communicating with his peers, he is naturally good at debate and is a formidable enemy in a battle of wits. Casper is also remarkably stubborn. He'll argue any point with you until he's blue in the face, and if he doesn't make you see something his way, he'll just keep on arguing. It is very, very difficult to get him to change his mind.
Casper is quiet and bookish and, as a result, he's always had trouble relating to his peers. He's always been better at talking to adults than to anyone in his own age group. He's more likely to think of someone that doesn't accept him as stupid, ignorant or just plain mean (and with good reason; this has generally been his experience), but the issue is that he tends to write people off by stereotyping them. He lacks confidence in himself and doesn't really know who he is, exactly, which is partially because his body has served as host to so many other inhabitants.
Casper's biggest flaw is that he treats people like puzzles. His outside perspective and his logical mind lead him to overemphasize the scientific and devalue the emotional, so he has a tendency not to give credence to things that can't be explained by hard science. This is an especially difficult flaw to deal with when your job is to work with the supernatural. Casper deals with this by treating the languages he uncovers like code, trying to root them in logic instead of in magic.
Hard as he tries, though, his life is deeply affected by his curse, and unless he breaks it he'll never escape it. Because he can't exactly go telling the rest of the world that he was cursed by an angry spirit, he quietly relies on the myth that he's crazy, but sometimes, in his more logical moments, he's not so sure that he isn't. The biggest problem for Casper is that he is often forced to take responsibility for a set of actions that is genuinely not his fault, but since he's rarely able to explain why he's done inappropriate things, he has had no choice but to bear the punishment for many of things that he never really did. Fortunately, no spirits have ever used his body to kill someone. Yet.
History:
You could say that Casper Quentin Crane was almost destined to be a linguist. His father, Johnathan Crane, had a brilliant mind and a restless soul. A linguist himself, John and his archaeologist wife Clémance were just leaving the excavation site in Toulouse, France, when Casper came screaming into the world, nearly two months early. After the confusion of his birth, Clémance insisted that the little family cease their global adventures for a few years and settle in John's home country, the United States. John managed to dodge this ultimatum until Casper was almost four, and then relented, taking a job as a professor of linguistics in upstate New York. At home, Casper spoke only French with his mother and only English with his father, making him a native speaker of each language. This pleased John, and, as he wanted to get as much out of Casper's early phases of language acquisition as possible, he enrolled his son in the local Spanish immersion school, giving Casper the opportunity to gain native fluency in three languages. Although John was pleased, Casper spoke in a strange pastiche of language until he was about eight and became better at sorting out the languages in his head.
It wasn't long before both parents' wanderlust returned, however, and when Casper was nine the family moved across the world to Greece, where near-extinct languages awaited his father and archaeological conquests awaited his mother. It was great for both of them, but Casper was unhappy about the move, at least until he made a few Greek friends. As a result of the frequent moving around coupled with his own shy bookishness, he had a tendency to seek out adults instead of peers, which is how he ended up spending much of his time with the other linguists that his father knew in Greece. It was in this learning-rich environment that Casper began to pick up modern Greek as his fourth language, and Casper spent much more of his time studying than exploring or socializing. Enthusiastic about his son's apparent dedication to language, John took seized the opportunity to begin to teach the boy Latin. Casper absolutely hated it, but even his repeated appeals to his mother couldn't stop his father's desire to, as he called it, "lay the foundations for a brilliant linguist." John spared no opportunity to remind Casper how lucky he was that he was nearly quadrilingual at such a young age, and he enthused almost daily about the vast advantages Casper would have now that he had a foundation built in Latin and Greek. Casper learned not to complain, and in the years that followed, he even began to embrace his unintended skill set. Like it or not, he was really good with languages, and he couldn't help but try to find the patterns between the ones he already knew.
When Casper was twelve, the family moved again so John could be part of a two-year language project in Cairo, but this time Casper and Clémance did not go with him, as John had dubbed it "too dangerous." For two glorious years, Casper was allowed to relax (more or less) in France under the firm but not obsessive tutelage of his mother. Clémance talked to her husband at least once a day, and both mother and child visited him on several occasions. Although Casper was glad he didn't have to live there, he was fascinated by Cairo's local language, Egyptian Arabic.
It was during this time period that Casper's parents were offered positions with The Company and, after much discussion, Clémance decided that they would move one last time and keep Cardiff as the family's home base from then on.
Curse:
Due to a phenomenally bad experience when he was sixteen, Casper is under the thrall of a powerful and assumed-permanent curse that made his body a bridge between the spiritual and physical world. He is, therefore, extremely susceptible to possession by the spirits of the dead. When a spirit possesses Casper, his consciousness essentially enters a dormant state and the consciousness of the ghost replaces it, which means that Casper immediately appears to have acquired a different personality, as the ghost is speaking and acting through him. While a spirit is in control of his body, Casper will retain the memories and skills of that spirit (if the spirit can cook, for example, Casper will be able to make whatever recipes the spirit would like). He will not, however, be able to preform all the same tasks with the same level of aptitude as the spirit's original body. Because Casper's body is just a host, he will not retain the muscle memory to play an instrument, perform a martial art, or succeed in any other physical challenge with the same degree of accuracy and skill as the spirit's body. Although Casper sometimes "wake up" (usually with the help of a sensitive) and communicate with the spirit to a limited degree when it is inhabiting his body, he cannot eject it and he doesn't retain any of the special knowledge that the spirit endows him with; the most that'll happen is he'll get déjà vu.
Although the spirit can't stay in it forever (usually they grow tired after one to three days depending on how recently they died), Casper can't eject spirits from his body by himself and he is always vulnerable to what the spirits do while they are possessing him. He is especially vulnerable to new spirits, because they are not used to his body and don't understand Calvin's personal physical limitations. Of course, while the spirits themselves don't have to deal with the consequences of their actions, Casper does, and those consequences can sometimes be very severe. If he's lucky, he'll wake up sore and with a few strained muscles; if he's not, he could wake up severely wounded or in jail. Or both.
The curse is not completely without its uses, however. Despite the liability of the curse, Casper's possessions allow spirits to come back and give warnings or explain problems. Of course, they'll always use their original language to deliver any messages they might have, but it helps that when Casper gets his body back he might be able to translate those messages.
Qualifications & Specialty:
Swarthmore University: B.S. in Linguistics, focus in Arabic and Old French
One year abroad at Université Française d'Égypte (holds a one-year completion degree)
University of Wales (Trinity Saint David): M.A. in Classical Languages: Licenses in Ancient Greek and Latin
SPECIALTY: Deciphering ancient languages, particularly those with a Greek or Latin root. Casper is both meticulous and obsessive, and he's never given up on a puzzle. Although he's not a super-genius who can translate hundreds of lines of ancient text in five minutes, if you want someone to decode that ancient script of yours and you're prepared to give him some time to solve it, Casper's your man. Casper also happens to be fluent in five languages (a direct result of his parents' travelling all over when he was small) and he can speak passably in three more. This makes him useful if you want to communicate with the natives and English isn't an option. Casper is also quite good at sorting and filing, so he'd be a good resource for the library and treasury departments. He does, however, vastly prefer to be a behind-the-scenes man; someone for the Rugged Adventurers to take their difficult language codes to. He'll leave the Mother House if he has to (which is probably often, considering the usefulness of his skills), but he vastly prefers to work remotely if possible, mostly owing to the fact that his possession curse makes him a liability in on-site situations.
Casper has varying levels of fluency in the following languages:
English (Spoken, read, written, native speaker)
French (Spoken, read, written, native speaker)
Spanish (Spoken, read, advanced fluency)
Arabic (Spoken, read, advanced fluency)
Modern Greek (Spoken, read, intermediate fluency)
Italian (Spoken, read, speech emergence)
Latin (Spoken (to an extent), read, speech emergence)
Ancient Greek (Spoken (to an extent), read, early production)
Welsh (Spoken, early production)
It should be noted that Casper's control over these languages is by no means perfect, especially in situations where he needs to act as translator in one of his weaker languages. He's completely solid in his native and advanced fluency languages, but it's entirely possible that someone will speak to him in Italian or Greek and upon being asked what was said he'll respond with "She wished us good health and happiness and... there was something about a goat." It's also true that although Casper is great with languages he's not really a cultural expert. He tends to know some fun cultural trivia here and there, but even if he's speaking with the utmost politeness, he's still liable to offend someone with his body language.
[OOC Note: Although I have intermediate fluency in French and I actually do know a few things about linguistics (I've got an undergraduate minor in it IRL), I obviously don't have nearly the level of skill Casper does. When he speaks in any of these languages I'll specify which one and probably say things like "'Great Scott,' he exclaimed in Arabic."]
Additional Skills & Info:
Casper chose the life of the mind rather than the life of the big and brawny, so he's pretty useless in combat. He knows some basic self-defense (his father made him learn when he was a teenager) and some basic Tai Chi, although that's more for relaxation than anything. He is, however, a moderately fast runner, so in a pinch he can usually manage to escape from being eaten by hordes of angry spirits. Generally, though, he's the member of the team that's more likely to say "Wait! I've got an idea!" and lure his adversaries off a cliff or down a pit or something like that.
Additionally, Casper sneezes when he eats chocolate, which means that people will often coerce him into eating it and then laugh at him. (He avoids chocolate where possible for this reason.) He's classically trained in piano but he doesn't like showing off this skill. He's fascinated by etymology and will often pause in conversation in favor of an entomology lesson: 'Did you know the word "dodecahedron" comes from the Greek words for "twelve" and "face?" Isn't that fascinating?' Thus, a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary will keep him entertained for hours.
Plot/Wanted lines:
Give us at least 2-3 solid plot points you are starting with or are requesting upon joining the game. Is your character assistant to one of our senior members? What do they hope to gain from joining The Company? Do they have a hidden agenda? (All major plot points should be discussed with the mods prior to approval, of course.)
Plot point/Line 1
Plot point/Line 2
Plot point/Line 3
Writing sample:
This game is mainly devoted to threads, third-person storybook style. Replies are expected to be no less than one beefy paragraph in length, 2-3 are preferred. We're not necessarily looking for a novel here, we just want to see the kind of tags we can expect from you.
Keep in mind that the truism quality > quantity holds true here. Yes, we like to see hefty tags. However, a wall of text is useless if you don't actually give the other player physical, concrete actions, expressions or movements to react to. Three paragraphs of your character's innermost thoughts while they stand still, say nothing to, or otherwise ignore the other character does not constitute a good tag.
Feel free to link us to existing threads or writing samples instead of pasting them here.
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