[ATARAXION] application;
Jul. 7th, 2012 07:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
knownsomecallisairamPLAYER INFORMATION
Your Name: Kelly
OOC Journal:devilishkurumi
Under 18? If yes, what is your age?: Over 18, def
Email + IM: devilishkurumi@yahoo.com; AIM: KurumiRP
Characters Played at Ataraxion: Eridan Ampora, HAL 9000 and Skulduggery Pleasant
CHARACTER INFORMATION
Name: Johnny Truant
Canon: House of Leaves
Original or Alternate Universe: n/a
Canon Point: XVII, Footnote #390
Number: RNG
Setting: Johnny's universe is basically ours, from right around the mid 1990's. There are no magical properties about the world, except for the influence of Zampanò's manuscript on the people who interact with it directly. (Johnny, Zampanò, and some of the girls who helped Zampanò get it together.)
History: Bear with me; House of Leaves is obscenely dense stuff, and there are various interpretations of the actual history of the universe. For this particular application, I'll be going with the more supernatural interpretation, where there is something dark lurking inside the manuscript of the Navidson Record, some dark intent that the pages were infused with as Zampanò wrote.
Johnny's story begins in one of two ways. For us, it begins when, at seven years old, Johnny's mother is taken away to the Whalestoe Institute after attempting to strangle him. Shortly afterwards, his father dies and he is put in foster care. Johnny is a trouble child; he constantly gets into fights at school, argues with his foster parents, and is generally the most aggravating child he can possibly be. His foster father, an abusive ex-marine, threatens him with violence and frequently makes good on those threats. During his life with his foster family, Johnny learned the art of avoidance; he learned how to play people, to invent wild stories and compliment and soothe the anger of people around him. These skills became part of his everyday life - even when he doesn't necessarily need to rely on them, he will more often than not fall back on stories than actually tell the truth.
In his mid-teens, Johnny abandons his foster life and runs away to Alaska. (This is where things get a little hazy.) Johnny spends some time at a boarding school, then works on a boat for another stint, and then finally lands himself in Los Angeles with a life full of drugs, sex and tattoos. Though he has none of his own, Johnny finds work at a tattoo parlor; his nights are generally spent in the company of his best friend Lude and a whole lot of women and drugs. Lude and Johnny use Johnny's ability to spin tall tales in order to pick up chicks, and Johnny's list of conquests gets long enough that it's sometimes hard to keep straight. During all of this, however, Johnny develops a serious crush on a stripper who comes into the shop he works at. Her nickname is Thumper, and he is in love with the idea of her, as well as her body. He knows nothing about her - not her name, or the name of her kid, or anything - but that doesn't matter.
Johnny's story begins again one rainy night, when Lude calls him up at three in the morning and tells him to come over to his place. Lude had found something in the abandoned apartment of an old man named Zampanò, who had died and left behind a bunch of junk, four long clawmarks in the floor, and a manuscript. The manuscript was the last and only work of Zampanò; a book about a movie that didn't exist, with references that didn't exist and quotes that were never said by the people who supposedly said them. The movie was called The Navidson Record, and it was a story about a house and the labyrinth below it. And inside it. A house whose proportions changed, where one day a closet appeared made completely of black, ashen walls - where the next, a door appeared, leading into a hallway that couldn't exist. The hallway led to a staircase, which led down into the labyrinth, or the roots of the house.
The manuscript, sitting in Zampanò's apartment, feels heavy. Foreboding. Wild and capable of doing anything, like slicing up the floor, like killing an old man or two young men staring at it.
Johnny takes it home.
At first, he only reads bits and pieces. He starts to organize the story in between work, bar-hopping, drinking, smoking, etc. etc., without straightaway noticing that something is Wrong, capital W and all. Then, one day while at work, he can't focus. He can't do anything. He stares at the needles and the ink, he has trouble breathing, and then he makes the mistake of stepping out into the hall. Everything now is going Wrong, the hall getting suddenly darker, his breathing still ragged, and then he can smell something behind him. It terrifies him. He shouldn't look but he does, his fear reaching its peak as he thinks he may have seen something - but there's nothing. The hall is empty. The fear suddenly subsides.
He knows something is horribly Wrong now, and it's impossible for him to stop it. He has trouble sleeping. He starts measuring the walls of his apartment to check that nothing's shifted, secures his windows with duct tape, starts abandoning his job to work on the manuscript, loses track of friends and work and everything that isn't the manuscript itself. His fear becomes crippling, to the point where he stops eating, bathing, sleeping - anything beyond what he absolutely needs to survive is completely forgotten. At one point, he tries to go to the doctor, to see if maybe there's something wrong with him mentally - his mother, after all, suffered from undisclosed mental illnesses - but he leaves before he can be looked at.
He gets off any and all substances. He goes to work, only to find out that he hasn't been there in months. Lude comes to see him and tries to burn the manuscript, but instead he leaves Johnny to his work, leaving behind his Zippo in case his friend needs it. He buys a gun to try and protect himself from the darkness that he thinks is coming for him. Or from him.
Sometime after he loses contact with everyone he knows, Johnny finds himself waking up with the first memory of a dream he's had since this whole thing started. In the dream, he had been a terrible beast locked inside a labyrinthine ship, being hunted down by a drunken frat boy with an axe. He's about to attack, when the frat boy turns out to actually be Thumper, and the crush he has on her blinds him to her advances until it's too late. She swings the axe and chops into him, again and again, and even when he wakes up, all he can think about is the dream.
This is where I'll be taking him from.
Personality:
Johnny is, in the most simplistic of terms, an incredibly unreliable narrator. His entire persona has been built up by stories and lies that he's told other people, and it's likely that no one, not even the person reading the book, will ever know exactly what his life was like before he found the manuscript. But we do know enough about him to understand his personality fairly well.
Johnny is reckless in most situations; he's quick on his feet and can come up with a story or a lie to cover most any situation. He's relatively charming before his descent, and he makes himself interesting enough to people for them to want to know him in various senses of the word. He's also very lonely; despite being surrounded by people at bars and clubs, and despite having Lude on his side, Johnny doesn't really have anyone in his life that he feels like he can really call his friend. Even Lude is just a good enough friend. He's not his best friend, he's not a confidante, he's just a guy that Johnny gets along well enough to come over at three in the morning for. There are no women in his life that stick around, other than Thumper, and even then she's only a crush he has. Nothing ever comes of it.
The manuscript makes paranoia take over all aspects of his life. He's still quick to think, eloquent in his own, disjointed way, and reckless, but these things are outstripped by the fear he has of what is lurking inside his apartment or, more accurately, inside of him. He's not afraid of the world; he's afraid of what's become of him, and what he's becoming. He has trouble sleeping, has night terrors, and is incredibly secluded. He doesn't talk to people, not even the people he might have liked. His recklessness shifts from jumping into fights to not bothering to keep up his health. He is singularly obsessed with the manuscript, and completing it is his only idea for how to get some peace back into his life.
The one thing that stays constant in Johnny's personality is that pervading sense of loneliness. Even if his hermit lifestyle is self-inflicted, Johnny still wants company. Thumper calls him at one point after he's secluded himself, and he desperately tries to latch on, to learn more about her, to get to know a real person outside of his own self - but of course, the phone finally gets shut off, and he loses that one last connection.
Abilities, Weaknesses and Power Limitations: Johnny has no supernatural powers. The only things he's very good at are prepping needles for tattoos, doing lots of drugs and telling tall tales so convincingly that people actually believe them. At this point in canon, Johnny isn't eating or sleeping well at all, and as such he's generally pretty weak. He's a scrapper, though, and if he absolutely needs to, he'll fight until he can escape.
Inventory: Four measuring tapes and the part of Zampano's manuscript that he's already sorted through.
Appearance: Skinny, pale, emaciated guy of average height. Dark hair, dark eyes, kind of average looking; looks like he might've been attractive once upon a time. PB used: Løzninger.
Age: 24
SAMPLES
Log Sample:
He's in the passenger seat with Thumper at the wheel and for one long, infinite second everything is perfect. There's a shadow of a cloud over them, hiding the sunlight, except there's no sunlight to begin with, just darkness and the light of the moon, except not even the moon is out. It's just dark. Dark, and they're not driving somewhere - they're driving away from somewhere, away from something, something coming after them, hot on their trail and swerving out of sight every time he looks back. Thumper is talking, but he can't hear what she's saying, and it's getting darker, so dark that even her face is obscured, and the wheel, and everything is black, and wet, and this ship is sinking fast. The water is filling his mouth, except it doesn't feel like water, and the immense depths are pressing in around him, smothering him, trying to bring the outside into him.
He tries to scream, to at the very least shout and alert someone, anyone - Thumper? Lude? Zampanò? - but none of it matters because he's stuck here, stuck in a tube of viscous fluid, something thick in his throat, and even his screams are muffled. Maybe his neighbors finally broke in and are trying to smother him to death.
When he opens his eyes, he realizes that he's still dreaming. The fluid around him drains away, the thing in his throat retracting; he nearly vomits when it clears his mouth, but there's too much going on for that. He falls to his knees inside the tube, and the impact hurts - hurts more than he thinks any dream could hurt. It's so dark, and unsecured, and there are people moving around outside of his direct line of sight. Like a dream Navidson had.
Navidson.
The Record.
He staggers to his feet, grabbing at the floor when he can't stand up straight. He doesn't know which way to go, though - where to go, where to find the manuscript, and by the time he finds himself out of breath, he's no closer to figuring out where he's going. He finds a towel lying near one of the unopened tubes and grabs at it, pulling it around himself and sinking to his knees in a slow, uncomfortable movement. He needs to wake up. This has gone on too long, far too long for any dream of his, and it's too lucid. Nothing's changing shape around him, except maybe the shadows, and he ducks his head to keep from staring at them or the people or anything. He has to get his head together. He needs to find the record, and his apartment, and his way back to where he was before all of this started.
All he needs to do is wake up.
Comms Sample:
There's something really wrong with me. I have the first dream I can remember in God knows how long and now I'm having another, only it won't stop, I can't wake up, I can't do anything except bolt my door and watch over the parts I have with me, which aren't a lot, I've already read this part. I need to find the rest. I don't know any of you and you don't know any of me but if you do, because you're part of the dream, then you know where the rest of the manuscript is, a big pile of papers and napkins and post-it notes, stacked and organized by subject, and I need it back. It's the only thing I have.
Somebody, please. Tell me where I am. It is. Whatever. And if you're the one, Mr. Monster, then let me just tell you that I didn't ask to come here and I sure as fucking shit do not want to stay. So just let me go. No more lucid dreaming.
Your Name: Kelly
OOC Journal:
devilishkurumiUnder 18? If yes, what is your age?: Over 18, def
Email + IM: devilishkurumi@yahoo.com; AIM: KurumiRP
Characters Played at Ataraxion: Eridan Ampora, HAL 9000 and Skulduggery Pleasant
CHARACTER INFORMATION
Name: Johnny Truant
Canon: House of Leaves
Original or Alternate Universe: n/a
Canon Point: XVII, Footnote #390
Number: RNG
Setting: Johnny's universe is basically ours, from right around the mid 1990's. There are no magical properties about the world, except for the influence of Zampanò's manuscript on the people who interact with it directly. (Johnny, Zampanò, and some of the girls who helped Zampanò get it together.)
History: Bear with me; House of Leaves is obscenely dense stuff, and there are various interpretations of the actual history of the universe. For this particular application, I'll be going with the more supernatural interpretation, where there is something dark lurking inside the manuscript of the Navidson Record, some dark intent that the pages were infused with as Zampanò wrote.
Johnny's story begins in one of two ways. For us, it begins when, at seven years old, Johnny's mother is taken away to the Whalestoe Institute after attempting to strangle him. Shortly afterwards, his father dies and he is put in foster care. Johnny is a trouble child; he constantly gets into fights at school, argues with his foster parents, and is generally the most aggravating child he can possibly be. His foster father, an abusive ex-marine, threatens him with violence and frequently makes good on those threats. During his life with his foster family, Johnny learned the art of avoidance; he learned how to play people, to invent wild stories and compliment and soothe the anger of people around him. These skills became part of his everyday life - even when he doesn't necessarily need to rely on them, he will more often than not fall back on stories than actually tell the truth.
In his mid-teens, Johnny abandons his foster life and runs away to Alaska. (This is where things get a little hazy.) Johnny spends some time at a boarding school, then works on a boat for another stint, and then finally lands himself in Los Angeles with a life full of drugs, sex and tattoos. Though he has none of his own, Johnny finds work at a tattoo parlor; his nights are generally spent in the company of his best friend Lude and a whole lot of women and drugs. Lude and Johnny use Johnny's ability to spin tall tales in order to pick up chicks, and Johnny's list of conquests gets long enough that it's sometimes hard to keep straight. During all of this, however, Johnny develops a serious crush on a stripper who comes into the shop he works at. Her nickname is Thumper, and he is in love with the idea of her, as well as her body. He knows nothing about her - not her name, or the name of her kid, or anything - but that doesn't matter.
Johnny's story begins again one rainy night, when Lude calls him up at three in the morning and tells him to come over to his place. Lude had found something in the abandoned apartment of an old man named Zampanò, who had died and left behind a bunch of junk, four long clawmarks in the floor, and a manuscript. The manuscript was the last and only work of Zampanò; a book about a movie that didn't exist, with references that didn't exist and quotes that were never said by the people who supposedly said them. The movie was called The Navidson Record, and it was a story about a house and the labyrinth below it. And inside it. A house whose proportions changed, where one day a closet appeared made completely of black, ashen walls - where the next, a door appeared, leading into a hallway that couldn't exist. The hallway led to a staircase, which led down into the labyrinth, or the roots of the house.
The manuscript, sitting in Zampanò's apartment, feels heavy. Foreboding. Wild and capable of doing anything, like slicing up the floor, like killing an old man or two young men staring at it.
Johnny takes it home.
At first, he only reads bits and pieces. He starts to organize the story in between work, bar-hopping, drinking, smoking, etc. etc., without straightaway noticing that something is Wrong, capital W and all. Then, one day while at work, he can't focus. He can't do anything. He stares at the needles and the ink, he has trouble breathing, and then he makes the mistake of stepping out into the hall. Everything now is going Wrong, the hall getting suddenly darker, his breathing still ragged, and then he can smell something behind him. It terrifies him. He shouldn't look but he does, his fear reaching its peak as he thinks he may have seen something - but there's nothing. The hall is empty. The fear suddenly subsides.
He knows something is horribly Wrong now, and it's impossible for him to stop it. He has trouble sleeping. He starts measuring the walls of his apartment to check that nothing's shifted, secures his windows with duct tape, starts abandoning his job to work on the manuscript, loses track of friends and work and everything that isn't the manuscript itself. His fear becomes crippling, to the point where he stops eating, bathing, sleeping - anything beyond what he absolutely needs to survive is completely forgotten. At one point, he tries to go to the doctor, to see if maybe there's something wrong with him mentally - his mother, after all, suffered from undisclosed mental illnesses - but he leaves before he can be looked at.
He gets off any and all substances. He goes to work, only to find out that he hasn't been there in months. Lude comes to see him and tries to burn the manuscript, but instead he leaves Johnny to his work, leaving behind his Zippo in case his friend needs it. He buys a gun to try and protect himself from the darkness that he thinks is coming for him. Or from him.
Sometime after he loses contact with everyone he knows, Johnny finds himself waking up with the first memory of a dream he's had since this whole thing started. In the dream, he had been a terrible beast locked inside a labyrinthine ship, being hunted down by a drunken frat boy with an axe. He's about to attack, when the frat boy turns out to actually be Thumper, and the crush he has on her blinds him to her advances until it's too late. She swings the axe and chops into him, again and again, and even when he wakes up, all he can think about is the dream.
This is where I'll be taking him from.
Personality:
Johnny is, in the most simplistic of terms, an incredibly unreliable narrator. His entire persona has been built up by stories and lies that he's told other people, and it's likely that no one, not even the person reading the book, will ever know exactly what his life was like before he found the manuscript. But we do know enough about him to understand his personality fairly well.
Johnny is reckless in most situations; he's quick on his feet and can come up with a story or a lie to cover most any situation. He's relatively charming before his descent, and he makes himself interesting enough to people for them to want to know him in various senses of the word. He's also very lonely; despite being surrounded by people at bars and clubs, and despite having Lude on his side, Johnny doesn't really have anyone in his life that he feels like he can really call his friend. Even Lude is just a good enough friend. He's not his best friend, he's not a confidante, he's just a guy that Johnny gets along well enough to come over at three in the morning for. There are no women in his life that stick around, other than Thumper, and even then she's only a crush he has. Nothing ever comes of it.
The manuscript makes paranoia take over all aspects of his life. He's still quick to think, eloquent in his own, disjointed way, and reckless, but these things are outstripped by the fear he has of what is lurking inside his apartment or, more accurately, inside of him. He's not afraid of the world; he's afraid of what's become of him, and what he's becoming. He has trouble sleeping, has night terrors, and is incredibly secluded. He doesn't talk to people, not even the people he might have liked. His recklessness shifts from jumping into fights to not bothering to keep up his health. He is singularly obsessed with the manuscript, and completing it is his only idea for how to get some peace back into his life.
The one thing that stays constant in Johnny's personality is that pervading sense of loneliness. Even if his hermit lifestyle is self-inflicted, Johnny still wants company. Thumper calls him at one point after he's secluded himself, and he desperately tries to latch on, to learn more about her, to get to know a real person outside of his own self - but of course, the phone finally gets shut off, and he loses that one last connection.
Abilities, Weaknesses and Power Limitations: Johnny has no supernatural powers. The only things he's very good at are prepping needles for tattoos, doing lots of drugs and telling tall tales so convincingly that people actually believe them. At this point in canon, Johnny isn't eating or sleeping well at all, and as such he's generally pretty weak. He's a scrapper, though, and if he absolutely needs to, he'll fight until he can escape.
Inventory: Four measuring tapes and the part of Zampano's manuscript that he's already sorted through.
Appearance: Skinny, pale, emaciated guy of average height. Dark hair, dark eyes, kind of average looking; looks like he might've been attractive once upon a time. PB used: Løzninger.
Age: 24
SAMPLES
Log Sample:
He's in the passenger seat with Thumper at the wheel and for one long, infinite second everything is perfect. There's a shadow of a cloud over them, hiding the sunlight, except there's no sunlight to begin with, just darkness and the light of the moon, except not even the moon is out. It's just dark. Dark, and they're not driving somewhere - they're driving away from somewhere, away from something, something coming after them, hot on their trail and swerving out of sight every time he looks back. Thumper is talking, but he can't hear what she's saying, and it's getting darker, so dark that even her face is obscured, and the wheel, and everything is black, and wet, and this ship is sinking fast. The water is filling his mouth, except it doesn't feel like water, and the immense depths are pressing in around him, smothering him, trying to bring the outside into him.
He tries to scream, to at the very least shout and alert someone, anyone - Thumper? Lude? Zampanò? - but none of it matters because he's stuck here, stuck in a tube of viscous fluid, something thick in his throat, and even his screams are muffled. Maybe his neighbors finally broke in and are trying to smother him to death.
When he opens his eyes, he realizes that he's still dreaming. The fluid around him drains away, the thing in his throat retracting; he nearly vomits when it clears his mouth, but there's too much going on for that. He falls to his knees inside the tube, and the impact hurts - hurts more than he thinks any dream could hurt. It's so dark, and unsecured, and there are people moving around outside of his direct line of sight. Like a dream Navidson had.
Navidson.
The Record.
He staggers to his feet, grabbing at the floor when he can't stand up straight. He doesn't know which way to go, though - where to go, where to find the manuscript, and by the time he finds himself out of breath, he's no closer to figuring out where he's going. He finds a towel lying near one of the unopened tubes and grabs at it, pulling it around himself and sinking to his knees in a slow, uncomfortable movement. He needs to wake up. This has gone on too long, far too long for any dream of his, and it's too lucid. Nothing's changing shape around him, except maybe the shadows, and he ducks his head to keep from staring at them or the people or anything. He has to get his head together. He needs to find the record, and his apartment, and his way back to where he was before all of this started.
All he needs to do is wake up.
Comms Sample:
There's something really wrong with me. I have the first dream I can remember in God knows how long and now I'm having another, only it won't stop, I can't wake up, I can't do anything except bolt my door and watch over the parts I have with me, which aren't a lot, I've already read this part. I need to find the rest. I don't know any of you and you don't know any of me but if you do, because you're part of the dream, then you know where the rest of the manuscript is, a big pile of papers and napkins and post-it notes, stacked and organized by subject, and I need it back. It's the only thing I have.
Somebody, please. Tell me where I am. It is. Whatever. And if you're the one, Mr. Monster, then let me just tell you that I didn't ask to come here and I sure as fucking shit do not want to stay. So just let me go. No more lucid dreaming.
