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i remember head down after you had found out
manna is a hell of drug
i need a little more i think, because "enough"
is never quite enough... what's enough?
GENERAL
Name: Atticus James Starling.
Nickname: None he approves of.
Gender/Pronouns: Male. He/him.
Birthdate/Age: January 19 / 18.
Grade: Senior.
Sexuality: Has dated girls in the past, but now primarily dates boys.
Major Arcana: The Hermit.
Minor Arcana: Swords.
Concept: Debatably good Samaritan takes on everyone's demons but his own.
APPEARANCE
| Height: | 5'10" | Hair Color: | Brown |
| Build: | Average | Eye Color: | Green |
Atticus always looks like:Atticus's general appearance would most kindly be described as scruffy. He's never taken good care of himself, cutting his own hair infrequently and wearing his clothes until they fall apart. Facial hair is a new thing this year and moves him from "unkempt teen boy" to "homeless adult" territory, but he doesn't really care. In fact, he prefers things this way, much to his wealthy foster mother's chagrin.
He wears his uniform because he doesn't like getting in trouble if he doesn't have to, but he always looks a little out of place in it. He's usually got his shirttails untucked or his sleeves rolled up.
He's got a bunch of rings, bracelets, and necklaces he wears regularly. Most are random junk he's accrued over time magpie style, but he does wear a woman's rosary bracelet that belonged to his late mother.
PB: Landon Liboiron
PERSONALITY
Likes: Dark chocolate, old books, climbing trees, cheap diner food, lupine and foxglove, audiobooks, noise-cancelling headphones, reading, being alone, roadtrips, making things, messy art, walking, thinking his thoughts, getting up before dawn, meditation.
Dislikes: Dogs (with the exception of Dakota), popular music, alcohol, talking about feelings, reckless behavior, blind optimism, letting other people drive, shopping for new clothes, sharing his possessions.
Atticus really wants to believe he'd be better off on his own. If he seems aloof or detached, it's only because he actually cares about people very easily and wants to spare himself the trouble. With peers, he has a tendency to be terse and blunt, and often seems exasperated. As a deeply introverted person, that's sometimes true. He can often be seen ditching out of parties after an hour or found holed up on the rooftop garden alone. But it's also just the air he gives off - a little uncomfortable and reserved, except in the rare cases where he's totally at his ease.
Years of living in shitty foster homes have taught him how to keep his nose down, especially with adults and authority figures. While he's prickly with classmates and even with his friends, he's capable of being charming and polite to adults. But that's a kind of social armor, too: he's found that that's the best way to get adults to leave him alone. He's deeply distrustful of grown-ups, and ones he really respects are few and far between. While he's never been a particularly political person, he does have a little bit of an anti-authoritarian streak.
But while he can be difficult to get to know, the few friends he does have will see a different side of him. Clever and quick-witted, he values people who can keep up with him in a conversation, and is easy to wind up into a friendly debate for someone who's otherwise so taciturn. He's never actually mean-spirited even if he is abrasive - not even with people he doesn't know very well. He's actually more willing to be frank with his friends, when there's a serious issue to be addressed. But he's always willing to give good advice if you're willing to hear it, and usually has something insightful to say on the topic of troubled relationships - he's had more than his fair share of them, be they romantic or platonic or familial.
His willingness to be an open ear is indicative of one of his biggest personal problems, though, which that he feels personally responsible for pretty much everything. He takes on a lot, even and especially when it's out of his control or he's not equipped to deal with it. He has a fussy streak that's not as carefully hidden as he'd like it to be; he's very overprotective of his friends, whether they've gotten hurt fighting shadows or just gotten their feelings hurt by a classmate. He's been taking care of himself for a long time so it feels natural to him that he should be the one to fix any problem, even if it isn't his problem.
He comes off as cynical because he knows the world sucks and will tell you as much. But he has a deep altruistic streak and does good things to make the net badness of the world a little less bad. This motivation combined with his tendency to feel responsible for everything is a dangerous combination, though; he often ends up beating himself when he can't help people, even if it was outside of his control or they didn't want his help in the first place.
He lives his life in a very calculated way. He's a cautious person. Not anxious, exactly, but always very aware of the consequences of things. He's been this way since he was a child, but he used to be easier to peer pressure; since coming to Finchwood, he's become particularly inflexible. The very real possibility of serious injury or death isn't lost on him, and he expects everyone else to be equally serious. He's unforgiving of anything he views as recklessness, especially the kind that endangers other people. This mostly comes out in training and when in the shadow world, but regular teen antics can also set him off.
Overall, he comes off as an overly serious, unfun, and unfriendly stickler for the rules, but none of that is really true about him on more than a surface level. He's capable of relaxing, enjoying people's company, and bonding. Some part of him would even prefer that to being alone. But, ultimately, caring about people is a liability, and he's been burned before, so he just endures it.
TL;DR
- ⊕ Altruistic, observant, careful, artistic, protective, intelligent.
⊖ Diffident, aloof, sarcastic, inflexible, short-tempered, withdrawn.
MISC.
- - Does not drink. Does smoke.
- Always addresses adults as "sir" or "ma'am".
- Does not call people by nicknames.
SKILLS
[Painting]: He's a talented artist. Prefers watercolors, but will paint and draw with anything he gets his hands on.
[Junior EMT]: Atticus is an aspiring paramedic and enrolled in a junior EMT program over the summer. He's also CPR, first-aid, and lifeguard certified.
[Origami]: Mostly cranes.
[Petty Delinquency]: As one might expect an antisocial foster child to be, he's pretty good at sneaking out of and into houses. He can pick locks. He's also pretty handy at shoplifting, although he doesn't do it much since he's been with the Klines, who give him a fairly generous allowance.
[Gardening]: A new but favored pastime that he's picked up since starting at Finchwood.
HISTORY
Family:
April Starling, mother, deceased. Atticus's relationship with his mother would be much more complicated if she had lived longer than she did. He remembers her vaguely but fondly, and doesn't like talking about what happened to her.
April's mother, father, uncle, and brother helped raise Atticus when he was little, but he doesn't speak to them anymore. They own a farm outside of Wenatchee.
Grant Ballard, father. An alcoholic who never tried very hard. He has three DUIs and a new wife. Atticus's relationship with his isn't no-contact, but it is low-contact.
Grant's family wanted very little to do with the Starlings after Atticus's birth and he never knew them well.
Pearl Kline, adoptive sister. Cups senior. Pearl's family fostered Atticus from ages 15-18, and while he's aged out of the system they still consider one another family.
Hometown: Born & raised in Wenatchee, WA. Currently living in Seattle, WA.
Atticus's mother was sixteen when he was born, and she dropped out of high school to take care of him. Her family was present, but unreliable. She knew who her baby's father was, but besides child support payments, didn't want much to do with him. She was a good and hard-working mother, if a naive one. But what she lacked in experience she made up for in affection. Though she worked two jobs, she was always around to read a bedtime story. Though her salaries were stretched thin between childcare and keeping her family's farm in functioning order, she'd save quarters until she could buy a boxed cake mix to make with her son. She did what she could with what little she had.
When Atticus was six years old, April was accidentally killed while trying to break up a violent argument between her father, uncle, and brother. Everyone is a little fuzzy on the details of the incident (which was eventually ruled accidental), but one of them pushed her, and she fell and fatally struck her head on the corner of a table. As April's death was being investigated, Atticus was removed from the custody of his mother's family.
He was shipped off to live with his father, Grant, who felt he was being charitable when he agreed to take him in. But life with his estranged father was difficult. Grant also worked long, strange hours, and spent most of his free time drunk. By the time Atticus was eight, he'd mostly learned how to fend for himself - and for his father, on occasion.
When Atticus was ten, his father was charged with a DUI while Atticus was in the car, and he was removed from his father's custody and put into the foster care system. He bounced around from foster home to foster home at a rate of two or three a year, never sticking around long as he began to develop behavioral issues. Some of the homes were better than others; there were the well-intentioned adults who found themselves in over their heads with such a handful of a pre-teen, there were families that need the extra cash where he was neglected, and there were foster fathers who reminded him too much of his own father for him to bother staying around long.
When he was fifteen and living in a particularly shitty suburb of Tacoma, he befriended his next-door neighbor, a girl a year older than him named Lucie. Her parents were even worse than his foster-parents, and they spent a lot of their time skipping school and committing petty crimes together. She was a bad influence on him, but he didn't look at it that way. He'd been alone for most of his life, so it was good to have a partner, even if she was a partner in crime.
Their poor behavior escalated for awhile until their relationship went up in flames. Determined to go to a college party, Lucie talked Atticus into helping her steal his foster family's car, which she then crashed while driving home drunk. Neither was seriously hurt, but Atticus felt his trust had been betrayed - he'd told her not to drive until she was sober, and had asked to be let out of the car multiple times. And of course, his placement in that particular home was over, anyway.
So, as he was going into the spring semester of his sophomore year of high school, he found himself placed in the Kline household. Clyde Hill was a far cry from Tacoma, and the Klines weren't quite like anyone he'd ever met in real life. His mother's family had been mostly loving, but thoroughly blue-collar and middle American. Everything after that hovered right above or below the poverty line. The Klines, on the other hand, were absolutely loaded.
He had a hard time adapting to the new lifestyle. Not only was he suspicious of the Klines' motives in taking in a fostered teenager, he also had Pearl to deal with. He was used to resentment from bio kids of foster families, but most of them ignored him. Pearl was a persistent thorn in his side that he just couldn't shake. He felt a little bad for her; he hadn't meant to usurp her in her parents affections, thin as they were. He didn't even really want the Klines to like him, and frequently tested his limits, picking fights about religion over dinner or smoking in the back yard. But the Klines were laissez-faire when it came to raising their troubled teenagers, and Atticus found himself approximately as likely to be mildly scolded for misbehaving as he was to be showered in material gifts for no apparent reason at all.
Applying to Finchwood was another sort of test. The Klines obviously didn't need an extra hundred bucks enough to take on another child, so they must have wanted him around for some reason. Going to a boarding school should have pushed that boundary. But he found it almost immediately parent-approved. That was almost enough to make him lose interest in going. Pearl applying too could've been the final straw. But after they were both informed of the truth, he felt like he didn't have any other choice but to attend. Saving the world isn't something he ever aspired to do, but it isn't something you turn your nose up at, either.
He fit in at Finchwood better than he thought he would. He picked up combat skills quickly, and excelled in his academic subjects more than he ever had without the support of private school teachers and small class sizes. He was even getting along with Pearl; without her parents and the entire weird familial relationship looming over them, they found they had more in common than they thought. She was even the kind of person he might willingly be friends with.
That, unfortunately, didn't stop their home life from being weird. He went back to Seattle for the summer because he wanted to do junior EMT training more than he wanted to stay on the school's skeleton crew, but it was kind of a rough summer. Even though the Klines have been financially supportive of him since he was placed in their home, he figures there's basically no chance they'll adopt him and he'll be on his own after senior year.
COMBAT
Persona Name: Mikhael.
Element: Air.
ACADEMICS
Core Classes: English, Mathematics*, Science*, Social Studies*, Training.
Elective Classes: Art, philosophy, leadership.
Clubs: Gaming, gardening. He also used to be in athletics & community outreach, but dropped them this year.
General Performance: Atticus gets straight A's in his classes, but probably wouldn't pop into anyone's head as a exemplary student. He only participates when required, strongly prefers working alone to working in groups, and only does extra credit if he's somehow slipped below 91%. He's in honors classes because he genuinely prefers the challenge, not because he's gunning for valedictorian.
Training is an exception to this rule. He never gives anything less than 100% of his focus where the shadow world is involved.
OOC
Player: JJ
Player Contact: oronsomestar@gmail.com / dropbox
Time Zone: PST
