Post by meadowlark on Aug 7, 2011 2:09:50 GMT -5
Cameron Kirkland
Scotland
Scotland
B A S I C S ;;
name * Cameron Wallace Kirkland
age * 15
birthday * November 16
gender * Male
grade * 9th
sexual orientation * Unsure
nationality * Scottish
A P P E A R A N C E ;;
height * 5’8”
hair color * Red
eye color * Blue
appearance summary * Cameron’s a lanky, scrawny youth whose legs and arms are far too long still and his shoulders are still too broad for his frame. He’s looking forward to the day when he finally fills out and doesn’t look like some flaming scarecrow. He manages to make himself appear taller by, counter-intuitively, rarely standing up around others. He has a habit of sprawling whenever he sits down, be it in a chair, a couch, a bed, or even a patch of grass. It is a given that he’s going to take up about twice as much room as one would expect.
His hair is a startling shade of red that, depending on how much time he’s put into combing it that morning, sticks out at all angles and spends a good part of the day hanging in his eyes. His eyebrows are nowhere as thick as his brother Arthur’s, but they are still decidedly thicker than normal. His bright blue eyes are often half-lidded, giving him a lazy look that says he doesn’t give a damn about what people think he ought to be doing, he’ll do as he pleases and take his own sweet time about it.
Cameron has a piercing in his left ear that he got about a year ago. He’d managed to wheedle parental consent somehow, though his father’s reaction had been less than favorable when the boy arrived home with a green, emerald-like stud in his ear. The teen likes the earring and is often found fiddling with it while he thinks or works on things. He’s usually found wearing a white button-up shirt (that may or may not remain white over the course of the day depending on if he’s been picking fights or not) under a dark green vest. The shirt always has the top button or two undone. He wears black jeans, his favorite pair has a tear in the right knee from a scrap that he’s particularly proud of. Depending on the weather he may or may not be wearing a long dark blue coat over the whole ensemble. The one other thing he always has on his person is toothpicks. He chews on them absently for the same reason that he fiddles with his earring. It’s a habit, and something to do while he thinks.
P E R S O N A L I T Y ;;
likes *
Bagpipes—they’re noisy but he likes the sound of them, and is actually rather good at playing them.
Ghost stories—His preference is more the dark fairy stories (such as the tales of Kelpies and Border RedCaps)
Dogs—He likes medium sized dogs, but doesn’t mind large ones as well. His favorite breed is the Scotch Collie ((Picture Lassie)). He loves the thick, silky fur and the elegance of the dog as a whole
Sir Walter Scott—He doesn’t read much but when he does he likes the works of Sir Walter Scott, especially Ivanhoe
Robin Hood tales—Something about living on the wrong side of the law while still helping people appeals to his rebellious side. He likes the idea of righting wrongs that comes through. Besides, Robin Hood’s band of Merry Men were pretty epic.
MacBeth—He hates most of Shakespeare’s works, finding them dry or repetitive, but he likes the tale of the Scottish usurper.
dislikes *
Arthurian Legends—He thinks they’re over done, and besides, they’re unrealistic in his eyes. He still thinks Arthur should have just stepped down and gone back to being Sir Ector’s son. He has no connection to the characters, but is always pleased when Mordred shows up and wreaks havoc. There’s something about the chaos left in Mordred’s wake that Cameron enjoys.
Losing—Whether an argument, a fight or a game Cameron does not take well to coming out on the losing side. He sees it as weakness, and he can’t stand the thought of being weak.
Sherlock Holmes—He doesn’t get them. He likes the sort of story and mystery that you can solve as the detective does. If he’s going to read a mystery he wants it to make sense to him in the end. Sherlock Holmes never has, and it irks him.
Coffee—If it’s a case of “you want a little coffee with your cream and sugar” he can tolerate it, but he can’t stand the taste. It’s too bitter for his liking. He doesn’t mind the smell, in fact he actually enjoys the scent from time to time.
His brothers—He doesn’t hate them, but feels it’s his job to make their lives miserable when he can—especially Arthur. He’s of the opinion that he would have been better off as an only child and tends to take it out on his siblings.
strengths *
Loyalty—Though it’s a bit of a distorted sort. Cameron’s loyalty extends to family members and to select people he knows (those people have only numbered up to two or three in the past). His loyalty to his family runs along the idea of “only I can treat them like that, and if you do I’ll give you as good as you gave them” rather than any outward sign of affection for his siblings or parents.
Intelligence—Though he doesn’t have much time or memory for dates and the like, he’s very good at Math and most sciences. He loves working on things that require calculations and that really only have one right answer (though the wrong answers usually have interesting results). He has a highly analytical mind—he just doesn’t always choose to use it.
Directional abilities—Cameron always knows exactly where he is in relation to other parts of the world and rarely, if ever, gets lost. Part of this is due to his ability to remember directions and keep track of which way his left versus right is. On the other hand, he also has an internal compass tied directly to the magnetic poles of the earth and his ability to read the magnetic signature of any particular location. If he has been there he remembers it, if not he just needs the longitude and latitude to find it.
weaknesses *
Lack of Empathy—Cameron has very little realization when he causes others pain. At least initially. He eventually recognizes it, and depending on the person might even regret it a bit, but in general shows little remorse for it. He hates to admit he was in the wrong so he rarely apologizes, preferring to make it out to be someone else’s fault.
Masochism—Cameron doesn’t believe that positive attention is genuine. Compliments pass him by, even if he might file them away to remind himself that the person who gave the compliment isn’t the worst person he’s even known. He acts out for attention, and prefers the attention that he gets at that point—often some form of punishment—because he knows that it is legitimate feeling and attention and the person isn’t putting on a show or ignoring him.
Short temper—Cameron inherited his father’s temper, there is absolutely no doubt about that. Shorter even if that was possible. He’s actually able to keep his temper on some subjects, but anything that resembles a personal insult, or anything that might call him into question, or even something that insults his family or upbringing is enough to change him from his languid attitude to a fit of anger that proves the theory that red-heads are hot-tempered.
fatal flaw * Need for attention—Cameron hates to be passed over. He feels like he has for his whole life, and can’t stand it. His method for getting said attention is to act out (see, getting a piercing without his father’s knowledge, fighting with his brothers, picking fights at his old schools). Even negative attention is attention, and he would rather that than nothing at all.
Bitter . Jealous . Giving . Rebellious . Procrastinating . Loyal
personality summary * Upon first encounter, Cameron is the epitome of laziness. He has a tendency to put off what he can and ignore what he can’t. He’ll always get it done eventually, it’s just usually not done until he’ll get in trouble for doing it any later. He constantly can be found lounging around, sprawled across benches, couches, chairs, patches of grass, etc, with his eyes half-closed and a toothpick or something else to chew on in his mouth.
Cameron has a serious jealous streak. Going hand in hand with that is his extreme bitterness regarding his brothers, his second one especially. He feels as though he was always held to higher standards than the others because he’s the eldest and also feels that he’s never had his own accomplishments acknowledged. He’s always felt that life was skewed in favor of younger children, or at least as long as he can recall. His jealousy rests securely within the realm of a jealousy of the attention others get when they do well. He’s never felt he received praise for a job well done. The only time he feels he is acknowledged is when he acts out, so act out he does.
This leads directly into his penchant for rebellion. He wouldn’t call it rebellion, he’d likely call it “selective obedience” but if it looks like rebellion and sounds like rebellion it’s probably rebellion. He very rarely openly defies a person in authority to their face, he’s a good deal more devious in his actions than that. Although he won’t defy them openly he will do as he pleases in the end, even if it runs directly counter to what he was told. It draws attention eventually and that’s what he wants.
Buried beneath his outer abrasiveness, Cameron has a personality that draws people to him. He’s “magnetic” in his personality in many ways. When he wants to be liked he can be, he just has to try really hard to avoid treating a person with his normal dose of harsh words and harsher actions. Because it is such an effort he rarely does it, but once in a while he’ll find someone he wants to have actually like him for who he really is.
Because his kindness and gentleness are buried so far behind the thorny personality that he puts forth, when he does act kindly it comes as rather a shock. He has a very giving and selfless part to himself. He speaks his care and affection for people in actions and gifts, even if the person never knows he did it or gave it. (For example, when Arthur had trouble at school Cameron was quick to let the bullies know exactly what would happen to them if they came near his younger brother again and they backed off, but Cameron will deny doing it til the day he dies (or so he claims).)
Once Cameron decides he cares about someone he is loyal beyond what one might believe him possible. He’ll defend them with everything he’s got: breath, strength, tricks, intelligence, the lot. He can’t abide the idea of anyone he cares about being hurt in any lasting way by anyone. He hides it extremely well, especially regarding his family. But even as he takes his frustration out on someone he hates himself for it and builds yet another wall of cold, dismissiveness.
H I S T O R Y ;;
history summary * Cameron is the eldest of four brothers born to a poor family. The one thing he will grant as a benefit of being the oldest son is the fact that he never got a sibling’s hand-me-downs. Occasionally he actually got new clothes and shoes rather than what they could find at a second-hand shop. And he always got new school books, while his brothers often had to use the ones he had written in the margins of. There’s nothing quite like the smell of a brand new book to make him content—it’s the one thing that he considers entirely his own from when he was growing up, new books may not seem like much, but he considers them to be.
He doesn’t remember life before his second youngest brother was born being only three at the time. What he does remember from right around that time was the visions he would get. He started reading by the time he was five because he couldn’t convince his mother to tell him about the things that called themselves the “Redcaps” or the creature he could see in the lake near their home. She called the things he spoke of “cursed” and refused to answer his questions. When he was finally able to read about them he began to understand why. The Redcaps were a faeri that captured and brutally killed unwary travelers and the creature in the lake? Well, it was a Kelpie, it would lure children into its watery lair and devour them. Cameron immediately swore off ever swimming in the lake again. He took a lot of grief for that later in his life from friends and family alike, but he could always see the creature lurking in the depths waiting for its opportune moment.
When he found out his brother Arthur could see the mystical creatures as well he was at first delighted, but it quickly turned to bitter jealousy as the younger child told about how friendly they were. Cameron mocked Arthur for it, hoping to drive his brother away from the fae, for fear that they were of the dangerous sort. It didn’t work and the longer it went on the more the older brother realized that Arthur had the good luck to see only the good ones, or the mischief makers rather than the killing sort. While Arthur found benevolent fairies, Cameron sleeps with a light in his room to this day because of the night terrors he saw when he was young.
Cameron started attending school when he was six. He was already starting to close off, and it got worse as his school years progressed. For the first couple of years it was alright and he started to come out of his shell a bit. And then his friends stopped being so innocent and started picking up their parents’ prejudices. He’d always had some trouble with the older students, but when his own classmates started to pick on him because of his father’s job and his family’s status it was a slap to his face and what he still considers the turning point of his own naïveté. He knew long before that that the world was unkind. He’d seen a Caoineag weeping outside his best friend’s house when he was seven. Three days later his friend’s mother fell from a ladder and broke her neck. She was a fine, strong, healthy woman. The fae never cared. And apparently neither did people. His friend’s family had moved within the year amidst whispers that the ladder’s rung had been sawed—it hadn’t.
As he made his way through school he watched his brothers join in the daily drudgery one by one. Arthur was the one he was most concerned about, though he would never show it and rarely talked to the other child without persecuting him or snapping at him. The boy’s love of his fairy friends may have been something that Cameron envied, but it was also something that he knew other people wouldn’t understand. He watched his younger brother do everything he could to please the people around him, while the redhead chose another path and let others deal with their own issues with him, and fought with those who couldn’t.
When Cameron was about ten, Arthur seven, he overheard some of his classmates talking about the “strange ones.” He recognized the nickname they used to make it sound like they weren’t talking about him, the difference being that it was plural this time. They say that eavesdroppers never hear what they want to hear. Cameron would disagree, sure he didn’t want to hear what he did exactly, but he was also very glad he did. Turns out the plural referred to his younger siblings. He felt his temper snap faster than he expected and he came around the corner to confront the other boys to find them wrapped tightly in the metal frames from the glass trophy cases, the glass shattered on the floor. The metal trophies were bent and distorted. The boy’s temper evaporated and turned to horror as he tried to figure out what had happened. There was music humming in the back of his mind suddenly, like multiple bells pealing all at once. He tried to block it out, but heard the boys cry out as he tried to silence the chiming. The metal around them had tightened. He finally managed to figure out that he was making it worse and took off at a run to find an adult to help them, not mentioning anything beyond having found them there.
The next year, having started training with his Alice so that it didn’t immediately attempt to kill the object of his fury, Cameron found Arthur upset over the loss of some friends he had apparently mentioned the fairies to. He could feel his anger building again but cut it short and determined to locate the kids. He found them, sat them down and had what amounted to a “Fine, ignore him, but so help me you tell anyone about this and you’ll wish you hadn’t” ultimatum. The word of Arthur’s fairies never left that circle.
Cameron watched as Arthur drew further and further within himself, but didn’t know even how to begin going about preventing that, because he knew he had done the same. So, he didn’t bother. He focused on learning how to control his Alice, and how best to pass all of his classes, hoping some day (even at the age of 12) to be able to go to University somewhere for something. He just wanted to be able to attend. He always did well in his class, it was his behavior outside of it that caused problems. By this time most teachers knew his brothers as well and he was often called out for not being a good example, both at home and at school. He finally said “screw it” and did his best to be as bad an example he could without actually breaking any laws. The attention he got for it, without it being accompanied by “Did you see what your brother did, isn’t it amazing? Oh, you did ___? That’s very nice dear, now if you would look at this here.” was something he relished. He would get in trouble at school, and if it was bad enough at home as well and he’d know they actually cared enough that he existed to make the effort to let him know that they were “very disappointed” in him. It was freeing, and it went to his head and became a habit.
At fourteen he forged his parents’ signatures on a permission slip and got a piercing in his left ear. His father went ballistic when he got home. Cameron was stubborn and refused to take the earring out. His mother intervened just before his father actually ripped the thing from his ear. By that time the damage had already been done. Cameron had responded with the same level of anger that his father did (the springs in the couch were never the same after that) and things were said that neither could take back, even if they wanted to. His last year at home was icy at best and hell at worst. He spent his days at school and in town, coming in just before dark to go to bed and leaving just after dawn to avoid his father.
A year later his brother, Arthur, received a letter from Alice Academy and Cameron felt his constant jealousy rising again. He’d heard of the place and knew of the prestige and Arthur didn’t seem to care. The older Kirkland son would have given anything for that invitation. Finally his younger brother accepted. Little known to Arthur, Cameron had calmed down a couple weeks after the first letter arrived because he had received one as well. He accepted and is now waiting to see what the school year will hold in Japan.
A L I C E ;;
[/size]name of alice * Magnetism
what does it do? * Cameron’s Alice allows him to manipulate metals of all sort, and enables him to never be lost. His Alice is directly tied to the magnetic field of the earth which is different, slightly, everywhere. He can utilize his ability to warp metal into any shape his imagination can conjure. Weapons, art, constructions, supports, all are things he can form. Depending on the sort of metal and creation they are more or less solid.
how well can they control it? * Cameron has a decent grasp on control of his Alice. The metal usually does what he wants. On occasion though, depending on his mood and concentration the metal responds far differently than he expects. He still has massive difficulty controlling it when he’s angry—metal around him tends to twist and distort in direct proportion to how mad he is—and he can’t ever seem to get the metal back to its original form. He has tried in the past to return things he distorted accidentally to what they looked like before, but they always end up just more twisted.
alice class * Technical
star ranking * Two star
F A M I L Y ;;
[/size]father * James Kirkland
mother * Alana Kirkland
siblings * Arthur Kirkland and two (maybe three?) other younger brothers. ((I’ll edit this as the rest of the British Isles’ nations arrive))
R O L E P L A Y E R ;;
ooc name * Meadow, Lark, ML, Meadowlark, Hey you might get my attention as well.
how long you've been roleplaying * 6-10ish years depending on the form you mean.
requests? * France, the rest of the British Isles (Ireland and Wales)
roleplay example *
Blood. Death. Water. Fire. Claws. Screams. Lights. Ghosts. Shadows. A grinning face, with the sound of weeping behind it as it dipped it’s white hat into the blood pooling at Cameron’s feet and put the hat back on. It opened its mouth to speak…
The teen sat bolt upright in bed, his blue eyes darting frantically around the dimly lit dorm. He leaned over and turned on the lamp on his bedside table as he tried to calm his breathing. It was just a dream. The lamp wouldn’t turn on. What the hell? He tried again, reaching out with his Alice to touch the metal in the room and muttered a curse under his breath as he realized he’d distorted the inner workings of his lamp…again. It felt like his mattress springs were coiled around each other as well. And his filing cabinet’s lower drawer was off kilter enough that he would be fighting with it for the rest of the year. Damn it.
Cameron drew several calming breaths, considering the space between his bed and the overhead light. He finally gave in and got up, darting over and turning the light on. His roommate probably wasn’t going to be happy shortly, but he really didn’t care at the moment. He had to prove to himself that the Redcap wasn’t there and that the Brollachan he’d seen was only in his dream. He turned around, leaning against the door as he surveyed the room. Reassured that it was in fact all a dream he looked toward his filing cabinet and concentrated, willing the drawer to straighten out. He was pleasantly surprised when it did.
After another long moment of arguing with himself about shutting off the light he did, making his way back over to his bed. He’d attempt the springs in the morning, but he wanted his lamp working before then. He sat cross-legged on his bed, staring at the lamp. He reached a hand out to touch it, a physical crutch, but hopefully it would work. He closed his eyes, trying to get the metal to reform as it had been. The redhead could feel the metal doing as he wished and he breathed a soft sigh, perfect.
And then there was a wail, quickly recognizable to someone who had heard it before as the cry of Coliunn Gun Cheann. His hand clenched and the glass in the lamp shattered as he startled. He knew better, that creature wasn’t there, and even if it was it couldn’t do any harm. No one believed in it, except for himself, and it lost its power as such. He wrapped his arms around himself and drew his knees up, determining he wasn’t sleeping that night. Again.
The teen sat bolt upright in bed, his blue eyes darting frantically around the dimly lit dorm. He leaned over and turned on the lamp on his bedside table as he tried to calm his breathing. It was just a dream. The lamp wouldn’t turn on. What the hell? He tried again, reaching out with his Alice to touch the metal in the room and muttered a curse under his breath as he realized he’d distorted the inner workings of his lamp…again. It felt like his mattress springs were coiled around each other as well. And his filing cabinet’s lower drawer was off kilter enough that he would be fighting with it for the rest of the year. Damn it.
Cameron drew several calming breaths, considering the space between his bed and the overhead light. He finally gave in and got up, darting over and turning the light on. His roommate probably wasn’t going to be happy shortly, but he really didn’t care at the moment. He had to prove to himself that the Redcap wasn’t there and that the Brollachan he’d seen was only in his dream. He turned around, leaning against the door as he surveyed the room. Reassured that it was in fact all a dream he looked toward his filing cabinet and concentrated, willing the drawer to straighten out. He was pleasantly surprised when it did.
After another long moment of arguing with himself about shutting off the light he did, making his way back over to his bed. He’d attempt the springs in the morning, but he wanted his lamp working before then. He sat cross-legged on his bed, staring at the lamp. He reached a hand out to touch it, a physical crutch, but hopefully it would work. He closed his eyes, trying to get the metal to reform as it had been. The redhead could feel the metal doing as he wished and he breathed a soft sigh, perfect.
And then there was a wail, quickly recognizable to someone who had heard it before as the cry of Coliunn Gun Cheann. His hand clenched and the glass in the lamp shattered as he startled. He knew better, that creature wasn’t there, and even if it was it couldn’t do any harm. No one believed in it, except for himself, and it lost its power as such. He wrapped his arms around himself and drew his knees up, determining he wasn’t sleeping that night. Again.
