Post by matsunaga on May 8, 2009 6:52:27 GMT
the roleplayer
NAME: Matsunaga
CONTACT: MSN (matsunaga@live.com)
GENDER: Female
AGE: Over 18
ROLEPLAY EXPERIENCE: About 11 years now. I was introduced to it early on in life.
OTHER CHARACTERS: None yet.
HOW YOU FOUND US: RPG-D.net
Devon Culhane
"It was my sin, it was my shame, you were unconscious to the pain I was in;
I hear there's trouble in Shangri La."
Picture not indicative of clothing or personality; it's just the only decent-quality picture of him I could find where he had long hair and a shirt on.
NAME: Matsunaga
CONTACT: MSN (matsunaga@live.com)
GENDER: Female
AGE: Over 18
ROLEPLAY EXPERIENCE: About 11 years now. I was introduced to it early on in life.
OTHER CHARACTERS: None yet.
HOW YOU FOUND US: RPG-D.net
Devon Culhane
"It was my sin, it was my shame, you were unconscious to the pain I was in;
I hear there's trouble in Shangri La."
Picture not indicative of clothing or personality; it's just the only decent-quality picture of him I could find where he had long hair and a shirt on.
character basics
NICKNAMES: Devon, or "Hey, you"
AGE: 17
GROUP: Student
YEAR: Year 11 (He was held back in elementary school)
BIRTHDAY: June 4
GENDER: Male
PLAY-BY: Anthony Kiedis (circa 1990 or prior)
appearance
Devon is tall, with a fairly robust, athletic build for a boy his size. He keeps his hair long, mainly because he hates the naked feeling of having his hair cut, and rarely goes anywhere without a hat. However, he dresses extremely conservatively, preferring bulky clothes even in warm weather, and it tends to make him look heavier and more awkward than he really is. He has poor posture and slouches constantly.
personality
Devon's main challenges in life are social anxiety and agoraphobia. On first glance, he's quiet, introverted, and skittish, but he's always been tall for his age. This has lessened somewhat since he became a teenager, but he tries to make himself small whenever he's around people, leading to his tendency to slouch.
People who do get close to him find that, once he gets past his nervousness, he can be a lot of fun, and full of energy (as long as he doesn't have to go outside or navigate through huge crowds). His secret passion is music, and he dreams of being in a band one day-- that is, if he ever gets over his utterly crippling stage fright. Even just thinking seriously about performing in front of someone terrifies him.
The very few friends he does have know him as fiercely loyal, to the point where he is easily manipulated once his trust has been gained.
In general, he tries to be helpful and friendly, but unobtrusive, and his main goal in staying in school at all instead of moving back to Vermont, dropping out, and getting his GED is to get over his fears. He's also bi-curious, but his social fears generally prevent him from even thinking about relationships or sex very much.
LIKES: Music loud enough to drown out other sounds, singing, sleep,
quiet, small places, firearms, books, movies, holistic medicine, and soft lighting.
DISLIKES: Being touched casually, wide open spaces, overly bright lights, being exposed, overly excitable people
GOALS: Get over his fears, not get held back again.
family & history
STEPFATHER: Chet Mortheimer, 38
MOTHER: Jessamine Mortheimer, 37
FATHER: Andre Culhane, 42
STEPSIBLINGS: Piper Mortheimer, 12, Lily Mortheimer, 9
OTHER FAMILY: Elena Paulsen, 26 (tutor)
HISTORY:
As a child, Devon was very quiet; he didn't fully learn to speak until he was almost three years old, and even then, didn't speak unless absolutely forced to do so. At six years old, he was falsely diagnosed with a learning disability when a therapist gave him an evaluation that depended mostly on a verbal test; Devon answered primarily with "I don't know" or other evasive responses, not because he couldn't answer, but because the environment was uncomfortable, and he didn't want to talk.
He spent most of his school years in special education, consistently failing classes due to his lack of participation until his school was forced to hold him back a year. His parents hired a tutor, Elena Paulsen, when he was eleven years old to help him with his studies. She spent time with him personally, and came to realize that he wasn't mentally challenged at all. She had the school re-evaluate him with a written exam, taken in privacy, and not only did he pass, he was quite gifted.
However, he didn't really do any better in the advanced classes than he did in the remedial ones. There was too much talking, too many people, and now he was expected to actually join in on discussions instead of ignoring everything. Elena's help got him through the year, but it was clear to his parents something had to be done. She was fired, and Devon sank into a mild depression, being left almost completely without friends.
He was diagnosed with social anxiety the following year, and was put on several medications, but none of them worked well for him and he spent most of that school year in an emotionless, half-awake stupor, though his grades did marginally improve. His father bought him a guitar and a few lessons-on-tape, and Devon began to focus on it almost to the point of ignoring his schoolwork entirely. The constant argument over his emotional state versus his educational success deeply affected his parents' relationship, and they divorced.
Devon's father sued for custody, citing that his concern for his son's mental health would go unvoiced if his wife had her way, and he won the suit. Devon's official home is with his father. later that year, his mother remarried, and he hasn't visited more than once since then. His new stepfather didn't care for him especially, saying that he was "a pussy who just needed to man up", and even hit him, trying to provoke him into a physical altercation; it didn't work, and Devon returned home immediately. He never told anyone about it.
At fifteen, he began to look into more holistic approaches to his mental illness and eventually settled on a regimen of weight training (largely in response to his stepfather's aggression) and lemon balm to curb his anxieties. It works well for him, and he took up gardening in order to cultivate his own plants and make his own tinctures. His father, a former game warden, taught him how to use and maintain a small variety of firearms in the hopes that it would build his confidence; this yielded marginal success, and Devon found the methodic ritual of cleaning the individual guns to be more soothing than actually firing them. As it is, his a decent marksman from lots of practice, but he doesn't go shooting very often.
He still loves his guitar and has since practiced singing enough that he's gotten fairly good at it; however, he's terrified to perform in front of anyone. Even his father has no idea that he ever got beyond beginner-level guitar lessons, and has never heard him sing.
Since then, he has endured the American public school system and its kaleidoscope of problems, but his father recently enrolled him at Somnium Academy, hoping its environment would be better for his son.
dream form
Devon's Dream Form is the Headless Horseman. Like the ghost it represents, chains are strewn about his body, representing his fears holding him back; without a head, Devon doesn't have to physically speak, and can project his words without real sound, and on horseback he can run away from anything. This lets his dream form act much more freely than he can in real life, though his appearance is perhaps somewhat disturbing. He wears a tattered revolutionary Hessian soldier's uniform and a traveler's cloak; his horse is a night-black Irish Draught field-hunter. When he dismounts from the horse, it disappears.
