Post by TETRIS on Jul 15, 2010 19:33:49 GMT -5
CERAS CROSBY
DEMOGRAPHIC
Name: Ceras Ophelia Crosby
Age: 22
Gender: Female
Shift: Harpy eagle
Nationality: British
Sexuality: Straight
Religion: Nihilist
Politics: Indifferent
Occupation: Photographer
Residence: Origin Apartments
AESTHETIC
Appearance: Ceras is unglamorously skinny and clear-eyed, yet oddly, fiercely beautiful and independent. Her eyes are sharp, even cold, an ocean-green colour. Her hair is pale orange like peach crème with champagne and cinnamon tones layered in. Usually her freckles are not visible, leaving her pale skin unmarked. When she is flushed with anger or excitement, they stand out clearly.
Attire: Ceras favours a black backless top, held up by a strap that loops around her neck, leaving little of her curvaceous form to the imagination. Over that, she wears a black blazer with a feminine cut and deep, plunging neckline. Look, but don't touch, is the message her attire conveys. Any who are physically attracted to her are generally discouraged by the burning hawk-like gaze she directs at them.
Headshot:
PSYCHOLOGICAL
Personality: Weltschmerz is the theme of Ceras's life. She is already bored with the world at the tender age of twenty-two, and feels as though her physical reality will never quite match what she yearns for. She herself does not know what she wants, but she does know that she is not happy.
She is unexcitable and dull, without solid ambition, devoid of a role model or visionary figure she can emulate. Everyone she respected and admired in the past turned on her. Since then, she has come to believe that all people are equally flawed, and no single person should ever be placed on a pedestal and worshipped. Ceras looks down on authority, considering them a necessary evil, a useful ploy to keep savage humanity under control. She has no faith in them, however, and disregards their lofty ideals as hot air.
An observant, mischievous cynic drowning in silent misery, she is not sociable and can often be excessively curt. She is very prejudiced and certain of her own opinions, unwilling to change them easily. Ceras is quick to label others with respect to herself. She has an unwarrantably low self-esteem, and an even lower opinion of most people. Even if she does not see herself clearly, she is good at discerning her inferiors and is more than happy to likewise enlighten them.
Ceras does not wallow in self-pity; whenever she feels particularly depressed, she chooses someone stupid as a target. Flaunting her natural discernment and intelligence, she waxes verbose to thoroughly trounce them. Nonetheless, she has attempted suicide twice, once by jumping off the third story of a building, and once by trying to drown herself. Behind her bluntness, she wants nothing more than human warmth and companionship.
Likes: photography, greyscale colours, black and white, newspapers, flying, death, morbidness, the ocean
Dislikes: being alive, sand, the beach, bright colours, glossy magazines, stupid people
Hobbies:finding different ways to kill herself taking pictures
SOCIETAL
HISTORY
Parental/Early: Ceras is the younger child and only daughter of Grayson and Mikayla Crosby, with an older brother, Laurent Crosby. Grayson Crosby is an editor of the New York Times, and therefore, Ceras was born into a very intellectual, literary, upper-crust household.
Childhood: As a child, Ceras often accompanied her parents at social conventions where she was proudly displayed as a trophy. Ever watchful, and more quiet than not, Ceras would not smile nor babble for adult attention, but would watch the going-ons with her clear ocean-green gaze.
Adolescence: During her middle-high and high school years, Ceras attended a Catholic girls-only preparatory institution, where she was known for having a sharp, curt tongue. Like her father, Ceras did not mince words. She said what she meant, and meant what she said, and often cut truth to the bone with her tongue's knife. While not popular, she did not seek approval either, and spent a more or less solitary existence in cool contempt of both her teachers and peers.
Graduating to a elite university, Ceras was far less thrilled than her parents were. Having resigned herself to the assumption that there were no interesting or intelligent people in life, she enrolled, prepared to be hostile to her classmates once again.
Joining the daily campus newspaper as a photographer, however, she met someone fascinating, who infuriated, frustrated, and intrigued her all at once. Wyatt Luxe was a junior to her freshman, from an entirely unprestigious family. Someone, essentially, who pulled himself up by the bootstraps. No denying he was a bastard. Vindictive, resentful, and downright rude, he mocked her, derided her, and stood up for her photographs at the assignment meetings.
Her relationship with Wyatt did not further beyond the confusing, peripheral association they had with one another, and soon, Wyatt graduated and left college. On her own part, Ceras finished four unhappy years at college, dating and dumping a string of boyfriends on a weekly, if not daily, basis. She disdained them, their stupidity and superficiality, but could not help hoping against all hope that the next one would be different. One of her beaus, frustrated by what he perceived to be her "teasing" behaviour, tried to assault her but Ceras's brutal verbal mockery shamed him into retreating with his tail between his legs.
Adulthood: After college, Ceras went to California to work in a media liaison position her father arranged for her. Work did not go well. Depressed beyond belief, by the entire Hollywood scene, Ceras tried to kill herself one inebriated night, by throwing herself out the window of her apartment. Plummeting towards the ground, she closed her eyes, managing a small smile of peaceful satisfaction.
Ten seconds later, when it registered that she still wasn't dead, Ceras opened her eye, to find the city below as clear as day. She had sprouted wings... and talons... and a beak.
It took her a while, some careful consideration too, to understand her shifter nature. Naturally close-mouthed, Ceras didn't confide her ability to anyone except Laurent. She wasn't close to her brother, but he understood her pessimism and fatalism in a way her parents didn't. He advised her to come back to the East Coast, and offered to buy her a ticket. Substantially more cheerful than she'd been in years, Ceras took the earliest AM flight for New York City.
Her brief optimism turned into misery as her parents pressured her to find a suitable position for the daughter of a NYTimes editor. Then, coincidence struck. Reading the paper one morning, Ceras recognized the byline name on a lead article. Wyatt Luxe. After badgering her father, she eventually got Wyatt's contact information, and called him one evening. They talked casually, and agreed to meet for coffee.
Ceras found that Wyatt had changed, but in a good way. He'd lost his edge, mellowed into a cynical, obnoxious, but almost pleasant and strangely wise personality. Certainly, he was more lucid than she was, in better touch with reality. He saw the world the same way she did, but could laugh at it, which she couldn't. They spent a great deal of time together for the next few days, weeks, and Ceras found herself falling in love.
One night, Ceras found herself drunk again, with Wyatt. The friendly atmosphere took a term for the romantic, and Ceras soon found herself unable to keep check of her emotions. She shifted once more, in front of Wyatt. Before he could react, she fled out the window in a spray of glass, in a precariously unstable frame of mind. She'd dried to kill herself again, plunging into a river, and as the icy waters closed over her feathered body, her last thoughts were of Wyatt.
Someone found her floating, naked, in the river, and contacted her parents. Her father was furious, pulling strings everywhere at work to keep the story quiet. For the first time in her life, her mother listened to her as Ceras sobbed out the story of her shifter abilities. To her surprise, Mikayla Crosby was more supportive than she could have hoped. Two days later, her mother told her about a shifter community that she'd sniffed out. And before the week was over, Ceras was packed to leave.
Current: Ceras has found a life among the shifters. She's not miserable, but she's certainly not happy. While she hasn't tried to commit suicide or anything yet, the Crosby's did leave her in Peach Greene's care (at Origin Apartments) so that her self-destructive tendencies would hopefully be forestalled.
More and more, Ceras finds herself wondering where Wyatt is, what he's doing. She longs to talk to him, but can't find the courage within herself to ask for his number. At least, she can preserve the memory of what relationship they'd shared, however briefly...
RELATIONSHIPS
Family:
* Grayson William Crosby (father) - he's a stern, but loving, father, too consumed by his work to every have paid his children much mind. He's a little disappointed that both his children have become she... well, odd and moody, but there are more pressing matters for him to deal with.
* Mikayla Redding Crosby (mother) - she keeps it a secret from her husband, but her own father, Jackson Redding, was a shifter. She's sympathetic toward Ceras and Laurent, but has grown to love Grayson. Therefore, she wishes to remain behind with her husband, and can only send her blessing with her children.
* Laurent Brooke Crosby (older brother) - since he last saw Ceras, he's become a shifter as well, and learned that his maternal grandfather was also a shifter. With his mother's support, he's heading to the shifter community to find Ceras.
Acquaintances:
* Wyatt Luxe (soulmate) - Ceras misses him terribly and has no idea what he's doing or where he is.
OTHER
Trivia:
* Ceras isn't emo. Call her emo, and you will be on the receiving end of a tongue-lashing. Most people don't know that she tried to kill herself twice, because she doesn't act suicidal. Cynical, yes. But more defensive and hostile than depressed, most of the time.
In medias res: Ceras and Wyatt, alternative universe sort of interaction. This never happened, but they're my favourite couple to right about.
ORIGIN APPLICATION
Diet: Ceras eats her vegetables because she has to, but is a carnivore at heart. Not red meat, either. She'll eat pork and steak, but her forte is poultry and fish. She doesn't like carbs and tends to pick at her bread if she's given any.
Skills: She is surprisingly artistic, a good photographer (albeit a rather morbid one) and very intellectual in the literary routes. She writes well, analyses writing even better, and is familiar with a surprisingly broad repertoire of literature. Her favourite authors, however, are Nietzsche, Camus, and Sartre. Shocking, no?
Schooling: She doesn't like to talk about school much. Or really, anything about her former life. Too many painful memories.
Habits: Since she started shifting, Ceras no longer smokes because it nauseates the bird in her. She still drinks however, and is an absolutely terrible drunk. She also has a nervous habit of clicking her pen against a solid surface.
Criminal Record: Clean, if you don't count the two suicide attempts, only one of which was actually discovered.
Roleplaying Experience: 4-5 years.
Sample: Ceras likes to photograph car accidents, roadkill, disaster scenes, and human suffering in its most brutal and vivid.
She doesn't do nature scenes, animals, trees, or flowers.Cause that's majourly boring shit.
DEMOGRAPHIC
Name: Ceras Ophelia Crosby
Age: 22
Gender: Female
Shift: Harpy eagle
Nationality: British
Sexuality: Straight
Religion: Nihilist
Politics: Indifferent
Occupation: Photographer
Residence: Origin Apartments
AESTHETIC
Appearance: Ceras is unglamorously skinny and clear-eyed, yet oddly, fiercely beautiful and independent. Her eyes are sharp, even cold, an ocean-green colour. Her hair is pale orange like peach crème with champagne and cinnamon tones layered in. Usually her freckles are not visible, leaving her pale skin unmarked. When she is flushed with anger or excitement, they stand out clearly.
Attire: Ceras favours a black backless top, held up by a strap that loops around her neck, leaving little of her curvaceous form to the imagination. Over that, she wears a black blazer with a feminine cut and deep, plunging neckline. Look, but don't touch, is the message her attire conveys. Any who are physically attracted to her are generally discouraged by the burning hawk-like gaze she directs at them.
Headshot:
PSYCHOLOGICAL
Personality: Weltschmerz is the theme of Ceras's life. She is already bored with the world at the tender age of twenty-two, and feels as though her physical reality will never quite match what she yearns for. She herself does not know what she wants, but she does know that she is not happy.
She is unexcitable and dull, without solid ambition, devoid of a role model or visionary figure she can emulate. Everyone she respected and admired in the past turned on her. Since then, she has come to believe that all people are equally flawed, and no single person should ever be placed on a pedestal and worshipped. Ceras looks down on authority, considering them a necessary evil, a useful ploy to keep savage humanity under control. She has no faith in them, however, and disregards their lofty ideals as hot air.
An observant, mischievous cynic drowning in silent misery, she is not sociable and can often be excessively curt. She is very prejudiced and certain of her own opinions, unwilling to change them easily. Ceras is quick to label others with respect to herself. She has an unwarrantably low self-esteem, and an even lower opinion of most people. Even if she does not see herself clearly, she is good at discerning her inferiors and is more than happy to likewise enlighten them.
Ceras does not wallow in self-pity; whenever she feels particularly depressed, she chooses someone stupid as a target. Flaunting her natural discernment and intelligence, she waxes verbose to thoroughly trounce them. Nonetheless, she has attempted suicide twice, once by jumping off the third story of a building, and once by trying to drown herself. Behind her bluntness, she wants nothing more than human warmth and companionship.
Likes: photography, greyscale colours, black and white, newspapers, flying, death, morbidness, the ocean
Dislikes: being alive, sand, the beach, bright colours, glossy magazines, stupid people
Hobbies:
SOCIETAL
HISTORY
Parental/Early: Ceras is the younger child and only daughter of Grayson and Mikayla Crosby, with an older brother, Laurent Crosby. Grayson Crosby is an editor of the New York Times, and therefore, Ceras was born into a very intellectual, literary, upper-crust household.
Childhood: As a child, Ceras often accompanied her parents at social conventions where she was proudly displayed as a trophy. Ever watchful, and more quiet than not, Ceras would not smile nor babble for adult attention, but would watch the going-ons with her clear ocean-green gaze.
Adolescence: During her middle-high and high school years, Ceras attended a Catholic girls-only preparatory institution, where she was known for having a sharp, curt tongue. Like her father, Ceras did not mince words. She said what she meant, and meant what she said, and often cut truth to the bone with her tongue's knife. While not popular, she did not seek approval either, and spent a more or less solitary existence in cool contempt of both her teachers and peers.
Graduating to a elite university, Ceras was far less thrilled than her parents were. Having resigned herself to the assumption that there were no interesting or intelligent people in life, she enrolled, prepared to be hostile to her classmates once again.
Joining the daily campus newspaper as a photographer, however, she met someone fascinating, who infuriated, frustrated, and intrigued her all at once. Wyatt Luxe was a junior to her freshman, from an entirely unprestigious family. Someone, essentially, who pulled himself up by the bootstraps. No denying he was a bastard. Vindictive, resentful, and downright rude, he mocked her, derided her, and stood up for her photographs at the assignment meetings.
Her relationship with Wyatt did not further beyond the confusing, peripheral association they had with one another, and soon, Wyatt graduated and left college. On her own part, Ceras finished four unhappy years at college, dating and dumping a string of boyfriends on a weekly, if not daily, basis. She disdained them, their stupidity and superficiality, but could not help hoping against all hope that the next one would be different. One of her beaus, frustrated by what he perceived to be her "teasing" behaviour, tried to assault her but Ceras's brutal verbal mockery shamed him into retreating with his tail between his legs.
Adulthood: After college, Ceras went to California to work in a media liaison position her father arranged for her. Work did not go well. Depressed beyond belief, by the entire Hollywood scene, Ceras tried to kill herself one inebriated night, by throwing herself out the window of her apartment. Plummeting towards the ground, she closed her eyes, managing a small smile of peaceful satisfaction.
Ten seconds later, when it registered that she still wasn't dead, Ceras opened her eye, to find the city below as clear as day. She had sprouted wings... and talons... and a beak.
It took her a while, some careful consideration too, to understand her shifter nature. Naturally close-mouthed, Ceras didn't confide her ability to anyone except Laurent. She wasn't close to her brother, but he understood her pessimism and fatalism in a way her parents didn't. He advised her to come back to the East Coast, and offered to buy her a ticket. Substantially more cheerful than she'd been in years, Ceras took the earliest AM flight for New York City.
Her brief optimism turned into misery as her parents pressured her to find a suitable position for the daughter of a NYTimes editor. Then, coincidence struck. Reading the paper one morning, Ceras recognized the byline name on a lead article. Wyatt Luxe. After badgering her father, she eventually got Wyatt's contact information, and called him one evening. They talked casually, and agreed to meet for coffee.
Ceras found that Wyatt had changed, but in a good way. He'd lost his edge, mellowed into a cynical, obnoxious, but almost pleasant and strangely wise personality. Certainly, he was more lucid than she was, in better touch with reality. He saw the world the same way she did, but could laugh at it, which she couldn't. They spent a great deal of time together for the next few days, weeks, and Ceras found herself falling in love.
One night, Ceras found herself drunk again, with Wyatt. The friendly atmosphere took a term for the romantic, and Ceras soon found herself unable to keep check of her emotions. She shifted once more, in front of Wyatt. Before he could react, she fled out the window in a spray of glass, in a precariously unstable frame of mind. She'd dried to kill herself again, plunging into a river, and as the icy waters closed over her feathered body, her last thoughts were of Wyatt.
Someone found her floating, naked, in the river, and contacted her parents. Her father was furious, pulling strings everywhere at work to keep the story quiet. For the first time in her life, her mother listened to her as Ceras sobbed out the story of her shifter abilities. To her surprise, Mikayla Crosby was more supportive than she could have hoped. Two days later, her mother told her about a shifter community that she'd sniffed out. And before the week was over, Ceras was packed to leave.
Current: Ceras has found a life among the shifters. She's not miserable, but she's certainly not happy. While she hasn't tried to commit suicide or anything yet, the Crosby's did leave her in Peach Greene's care (at Origin Apartments) so that her self-destructive tendencies would hopefully be forestalled.
More and more, Ceras finds herself wondering where Wyatt is, what he's doing. She longs to talk to him, but can't find the courage within herself to ask for his number. At least, she can preserve the memory of what relationship they'd shared, however briefly...
RELATIONSHIPS
Family:
* Grayson William Crosby (father) - he's a stern, but loving, father, too consumed by his work to every have paid his children much mind. He's a little disappointed that both his children have become she... well, odd and moody, but there are more pressing matters for him to deal with.
* Mikayla Redding Crosby (mother) - she keeps it a secret from her husband, but her own father, Jackson Redding, was a shifter. She's sympathetic toward Ceras and Laurent, but has grown to love Grayson. Therefore, she wishes to remain behind with her husband, and can only send her blessing with her children.
* Laurent Brooke Crosby (older brother) - since he last saw Ceras, he's become a shifter as well, and learned that his maternal grandfather was also a shifter. With his mother's support, he's heading to the shifter community to find Ceras.
Acquaintances:
* Wyatt Luxe (soulmate) - Ceras misses him terribly and has no idea what he's doing or where he is.
OTHER
Trivia:
* Ceras isn't emo. Call her emo, and you will be on the receiving end of a tongue-lashing. Most people don't know that she tried to kill herself twice, because she doesn't act suicidal. Cynical, yes. But more defensive and hostile than depressed, most of the time.
In medias res: Ceras and Wyatt, alternative universe sort of interaction. This never happened, but they're my favourite couple to right about.
She watched him move through the office space. He entered through glass double doors at one end of the corridor, bringing crisp sun with him, metallic glints of sparkle and light trapped in the bleached ruff of fur on his coat, in his light hair, in his pale dancing eyes. He moved with a singular lazy ambiguity in his stride, past the rows and columns of cubicles, meandering between upholstered dividers.
He left a trail of careless waste in his wake. Picking up a pen impersonally, casually, from one desk, nervous long fingers playing with the cap until the clip snapped off. He would leave the damaged property next to another man's coffee cup, seemingly oblivious to the entire sequence of events. Paper, too. He took any lined or white sheet, folded it again, and again, and again, then ran his nails along the creases until they were curled and fraying. Eventually, he dropped it on the floor.
When he exited through the chipped wooden door, stooping and hunching his narrow shoulders to shuffle out of her sight, she rose from her seat with a sigh, suddenly filled with an urge for a smoke. By the time she was outside, he was already there, with a few half-extinguished butts still glowing dimly at his feet. He had one cigarette hanging from his mouth, a fresh roll of thick smooth paper twitching in a free hand.
She absently unfolded the scrap of paper he had dropped, then stared at her own hands in disgust; she'd somehow traded her smokes for his litter.
"Can I have one?"
He turned pale eyes to her, a very lively, amused gaze nothing at all like his nonchalance, handing her his free cigarette and habitually reaching for another. She's repulsed but consumed by his decadence, his innocence. It's no different when they reach his hotel room. He opened the mini-bar second-naturedly, tossing her something without checking the label. He only drinks a mouthful - half a mouthful - before settling his drink on the bureau.
She checked her own can of beer; cheap American beer, something that never agreed with her. If she was going to drink swill, she'd rather it look a little classier than Pabst at least.
"What's yours?"
It was a little disconcerting that he had to retrieve the bottle of liquor to check.
"Grey Goose vodka." He studied the frosted glass with his head at a tilt. His hair wasn't long, but it fell casually in sweeping pale locks that shaded near the tips. "Want some?"
She gulped a mouthful directly from the bottle, coughing as the wintery chill and bitter astringent taste seized her breath. Then the bite faded, leaving her light-headed, with a spreading warmth (from stinging tears) left in her eyes.
He tasted of smoke and sun and the slight sour tang of vodka. He smelled like smoke and crisp wind. She had downed the rest of the drink some time between exchanging empty pleasantries and trapping him against the wall. Dizzy, light-headed, wolfing down the second-hand smoke, she was barely aware of falling into him before the room closed in and she felt like a folded crumpled slip of paper tumbling to the ground.
She awoke to an empty room. Carefully arranged on a made hotel bed, with her hands folded across her stomach, her handbag on the bureau. He had sat there for a while, it seemed, by the small piles of ash, the half-empty bottles, and mutilated pen caps on the coffee table. On a second scan of the room, his suitcase and clothes were all gone. She collecting an empty pack of cigarettes and two butts, adding them to the collage.
The next morning, she admired her handiwork, the way each item reflected in the glass top of the table. Black-and-white print of the paper only reinforced the transient dissidence. "Staff Photographer / Ceras Crosby," ran the byline. He called her that afternoon. She could only assume he'd checked her cell for her number. His voice laughed at her; she heard the snap of a lighter on his end.
"You're a terrible drunk."
ORIGIN APPLICATION
Diet: Ceras eats her vegetables because she has to, but is a carnivore at heart. Not red meat, either. She'll eat pork and steak, but her forte is poultry and fish. She doesn't like carbs and tends to pick at her bread if she's given any.
Skills: She is surprisingly artistic, a good photographer (albeit a rather morbid one) and very intellectual in the literary routes. She writes well, analyses writing even better, and is familiar with a surprisingly broad repertoire of literature. Her favourite authors, however, are Nietzsche, Camus, and Sartre. Shocking, no?
Schooling: She doesn't like to talk about school much. Or really, anything about her former life. Too many painful memories.
Habits: Since she started shifting, Ceras no longer smokes because it nauseates the bird in her. She still drinks however, and is an absolutely terrible drunk. She also has a nervous habit of clicking her pen against a solid surface.
Criminal Record: Clean, if you don't count the two suicide attempts, only one of which was actually discovered.
Roleplaying Experience: 4-5 years.
Sample: Ceras likes to photograph car accidents, roadkill, disaster scenes, and human suffering in its most brutal and vivid.
She doesn't do nature scenes, animals, trees, or flowers.
k-shck.
I wonder if his wife will see these pictures in the paper, centered in grainy black-and-white above a bold witty headline.
I wonder if, this time tomorrow, she'll be a widow. Appraising her red eyes and hollow cheeks and new black wardrobe in the mirror.
Or maybe she'll be sitting in an austere room in the hospital, morbidly fascinated by the plastic tubes and silver valves disappearing beneath a linen bedsheet.
k-shck.
She's not paying any attention to the lone photographer amidst the news crew, the microphones, the flashing sirens. I have my flash on to snap each shot in brighter-than-day clarity, but I probably don't even make her brain's short-list of imminent sensory feedback.
I think her tears are beautiful.
That, right there, was a real keeper. I don't have to develop the film to see the picture; my zoom lens and adjusted contrast froze a drop of moisture on her upper lip in a close-up of her face. Her closest eye is swelling already and the lashes are gummed with cloyed blood from a cut across her forehead. She looks wild with raw trauma and emotion.
Fast-forward ahead to tomorrow, then another day, then another week. It sounds insensitive, but she'll want to trade her rigor mortis of facial expression with the current hysteria. I know I would. Because it would mean that for another minute, right then, right now, she still sees another outcome. That's what makes her anxious, that that outcome is becoming less likely with each passing second.
k-shck. -flash- k-shck.
It's not like I tell anyone else these perverse things I think. The screwed-up ways I see the world. My fisheye-lensed reality.
Maybe I'm fortunate because I don't have to, or rather, unfortunate because I can't. The one person whose judgment I fear will pore over these rolls of film with me. We'll mash them together in every possible way, throw out a set and scrabble to together fling a new one, our collaboration sectioned into agreements and arguments by new updates from the phone. When we retire in the morning, all the vitality will be gone from the photos and whatever sanctity of life they once guarded can't be retrieved.
That's the penchant of our trade. Scavenging and devouring, we beat the dead horses, strip the flesh, and carve combs from the bones. Like a great swarm of locusts, we'll rise and move on to the next kill only after draining every last drop from this one.
In the wake of our yellow journalism and sensation-mongering, we leave behind empty tubes of films and used-up notepads and a series of frozen frames that capture a life shattering in slow motion.
k-shck. k-shck. k-shck.
Oh, the joie de vivre. Why, it's to die for.