Grandjester
08-15-11, 04:44 AM
Name: Jean Lafitte
Age: 23
Race: Yorfallian
Hair Color: Black
Eye Color: White schlera, no iris, black pupil.
Height: 181 centimeters or 5' 11"
Weight: 74kg
Occupation: Assassin/Adventurer.
Personality
Jean is largely unpredictable, having little in common mentally with humans. He speaks with a dry, drawling voice, riddles and cryptic words being common in his speech. On the outside he is usually curious, polite and calm. Under this is what sets his race apart from humans the most. Emotions are different for him than other common races. There are no positive or negative emotions in a general sense, they are neutral and are involved in the complex personality and mind of a Yorfallian. Emotions are not placed in priority, but for Jean neither is logic. He tends to follow a trait rare for his own race, curiosity. He is a manipulator of sorts, at times malicious and other times playful.
He does not place commitments highly, but doesn't disregard them. Good and evil in his mind are a concept he has little belief in, but the idea of which interests him greatly. He enjoys seeing those who believe greatly in this concept act upon it, and generally manipulates people solely to see such acts occur. He places the value of life rather low, not out of hatred but out of a lack of empathy. Sympathy, guilt, remorse and other such emotions are fairly rare for Yorfallians, and most emotions that can easily control someone aren't near as overpowering for Jean's kind.
Outside of his more deeper traits, he tends to act with chaos, and this often shows in his movements. He has a strange habit of moving in ways similar to a tap dance, and often makes precise, abrupt movements. He is generally not very fluid in his motions to the point of looking like some deranged mannequin but can be fairly coordinated overall.
After discovering his magical affinity, a trait unique only to him among Yorfallians, he gained a great interest in it. His interests and knowledge at this point are undeveloped, but he finds the concept intriguing. It is what currently propels him in learning and developing his abilities.
Overall, he is defined by his nihilistic, albeit positive, outlook on life.
Appearance
The immediate reaction most people get when meeting Jean for the first time, especially among humans than other races, is an almost instinctual response of repulsion. There's a strange wrongness about him, just the way he looks and acts, that sets off a sense of alien-ness about him until they get used to his presence. This can take mere moments to overcome, or it might remain under the surface of their interactions with him forever. This reaction is due to his race's lack of presence in the outside world, Jean being the only of his kind to ever set foot outside of Yorfallia and therefore he is mistaken as a human, but his mismatched appearance disturbs people.
Once they overcome this initial reaction, they'll take in the face values. Jean is a thin man standing at roughly 5' 11". His kind are unlike the other subspecies of humans, being similar only in their overall appearance and structure. His skin is an ivory white and is opaque, showing no scars or blemishes. His hair is black and grows backwards over his ears and down his head to slightly above shoulder length. The hair is slightly thicker than human hair and has a greasy appearance, though this is appearance only.
His eyes lack an iris, only showing a black pupil amidst the whiteness that contracts and expands seemingly to correspond with Jean's thoughts and feelings. His lips are thin and dark purple, as are his gums, while his teeth are a plain white and don't show signs of discolouration. His dark purple tongue is thin and slightly longer than a human's average.
His face is thin and sharp, his skin being hard but smooth and aside from the hair on his head and eyebrows he is hairless across his body. His nails are a moderate shade of purple and he lacks some things standard to humans, such as nipples, and his bellybutton is much smaller and shallower. To other yorfallians, Jean is physically attractive, but other races would probably disagree due to his strange appearance. His clothes may vary sometimes, but he commonly wears a black and white striped leotard along with matching tights, with the addition of black polished tapshoes and white billiards gloves with black fingertips.
He carries with him a retractable cuestick made of a metallic alloy that is light and has the durability of steel. It is roughly four feet in length, is slightly wider at the end and gradually thins towards the tip, and is white with a black tip. He uses this as both an item of general use, such as a walking stick, and as his personal choice of weapon in combat.
His appearance is overall outlandish, mostly colourless and quite cold.
History
Jean comes from Yorfallia, a fair-sized island nation in the middle of nowhere within the Outlands. Whatever contact the outside world has had with it has not gained the attention of higher knowledge and it's existence is almost unknown because of it. The rare Yorfallian might adventure to other places, bringing back whatever material goods or knowledge they gained with them when they return, but they seldom leave the island.
The society is kept together through the simple desire to survive, and banding together and giving and receiving help is logically considered the ideal system. Therefore, it is a very stable place to live, though not perfect. Cold, hard logic is what Yorfallians lead their thoughts with, and if you don't benefit the system then you won't be part of it. Because of the barren state of the island outside of the sparse habitable areas, being forced out of society is essentially a death sentence. Therefore, people make themselves useful, and get to live in return.
Jean himself was abandoned weeks after being born, and was taken in and raised by an orphanage run by adults who did not sympathize too well with children. He eventually ran away from this orphanage at the age of twelve, making his own on the streets for a year and gaining the affinity for survival and self preservation that he mostly follows through with in life from thereafter. He used tricks and manipulation to gain favor with the neighbourhood folk, and used this to avoid detection and consequences of theft and other petty crimes he used to survive on the streets.
Yorfallia had it's own culture, but sometimes brang in parts of others outside of it in the few moments of connection they have had with them. One such aspect was billiards, a sport that became common among townsfolk as an enjoyable and competitive pastime. Jean played this game in open matches with degrees of success, enjoying it as one of his hobbies.
After a year, he was noticed by an elderly man and offered a large sum of money if he were to kill off one of the man's business rivals. He was given knowledge on the target but was provided with very little to aid him in the task outside of this. He took his time in planning it out, inexperienced but having no concerns against murder for profit. In the end he snuck into the man's house at midday, a time when most of Yorfallia was in deep sleep, and murdered the man as he slept. His presence went unnoticed, the body being found in the afternoon bashed and broken, the window in the room was smashed to give entry for the attacker but no other residents heard a thing that would have suggested someone breaking in. The man who was murdered must have woken up during the beating, but again no one heard a sound suggesting anything took place that day. The method of death seemed to be from a savage beating with a blunt object, but the object used was not found anywhere in or near the house.
Having killed his target, Jean returned to the elderly man and was refused payment, receiving the reply that there was no reason why the old man would need to bother giving him money when he was only a street rat. This reply earned the old man death, his screams not leaving the house as Jean took the money he had earned from the old man's corpse, leaving it behind to return to the streets once more. He was however soon found and taken in by an underground group of contract killers and fighters, who did their jobs purely for money, but still accepted Jean's more enthusiastic approach into their services. It was in this group that Jean began to live a more prosperous life, and found his talent and passion for murder and fighting that grew over the years. He revealed his weapon to his cohorts, a simple wooden cuestick he had stolen from a billiards game after he had played in it.
Jean seemed to be a born genius in the art of stealth and silence. His skill was abnormal, and he only grew to discover its mystical nature as he became an adult. It was also at this stage that he had gained his trademark retractable cuestick, and he was almost never seen without it. He grew his social skills and characteristics through interactions with townsfolk, developing his manipulative prowess through his calling for murder. However, his passions would quickly develop past such, and he desired more than what Yorfallia had to offer. His ceiling of interests reaching critical mass, he left the island without the knowledge of his peers and seeked a new world, starting his adventures.
Skills
Intelligent - Jean is highly intelligent due to his race's natural quality, and also carries their strong memory and awareness.
Manipulative - Jean is quick to learn. He is quick to learn how people work. He is quick to learn how to invoke action and reaction, and has no restrain in pursuing such methods.
Emotionally resistant - From euphoria to rage to fear, Jean will remain relatively stable, unless it's an unusual form of emotion as a result of some kind of magic forced upon him.
Billiards Combat - His unique style of weapons fighting. He fights using a pool cue, similar to styles that use pole weapons or staves, but relies more on his natural agility and unpretictability when using it to perform hit and run attacks and confuse his opponent than straight up fighting.
Covert - He knows how to hide his intentions and movements from people, that includes being steathly and sneaking up on people.
Abilities
Dancing Fast - Jean is exceptionally fast, and can cross great distances in a short time, so long as he doesn't exhaust himself. He has a strange method of movement however, which looks like a rapid tap dance that allows him to trick opponents into where his feet will move to, but is very susceptible to being thrown off course with painful results due to his great momentum. Also, his movements are very loud due to his tapdancing shoes, which seems counterproductive for someone who used to be an assassin. This speed is not actually limited to his legs, as his weapon strikes and upper body movements are just as impressive. The level of his speed is equal to 2x that of a normal human's.
Absolute Silence - He has the ability to control sound to some degree, or rather cancel it out with magic, making absolute silence take over the area around him. The actual size of the area he can affect begins at about the size of a living room, and the effect can only originate from his body, he can't throw the effect to a distant location. He uses this when being sneaky, by cancelling the sound he makes, but can also capture nearby enemies in it to deny them their sense of hearing and throw them off their game, since he is more accustomed to fighting without being able to hear and they won't be expecting it. This magic doesn't seem to make any sense to other mages, and apparently only works because Jean wants it to, following no elemental or otherwise sensical method of operation.
Mantra Mentality - Jean has a strange way of thinking, following complex patterns that are constructed from countless strands of thought to form a tangable idea in his head. This is native to the Yorfallian brain, and is the reason for their high intelligence. He has developed a mental technique that creates a permanent construction of thought in his mind that is stored in his memory, and when accessed can be run through like a program on a computer. These mantras are initiated by speaking a word or phrase tagged to that mantra while thinking of it, and can range from twisting the face into a predetermined expression that will be the same each time the name of the mantra is said, to a called attack that would be far too complicated and specific for any normal person to perform. Such attacks require a large deal of preparation however, and often take several mantras one after the other to succeed due to the limitless scenarios they have to be used in. This is why Jean relies on hit and run and stealth, because in a straight up fight he cannot take the time to initiate such complex fight patterns in the heat of the moment. Due to the keyword in his mantra, and having to say it out loud and trigger a response in his brain through sound, it doesn't combine with his absolute silence magic very well and can give away his position.
Equipment
Cue stick - A metal, retractable cue stick which is made of a light metal alloy similar in properties to stainless steel. Other than being sturdy and easily concealable, it has no remarkable traits and Jean relies on his mantras and speed to make full use of it as a weapon.
Other than his clothes, described in his appearance, and his gold, he never takes anything else with him while travelling.
Age: 23
Race: Yorfallian
Hair Color: Black
Eye Color: White schlera, no iris, black pupil.
Height: 181 centimeters or 5' 11"
Weight: 74kg
Occupation: Assassin/Adventurer.
Personality
Jean is largely unpredictable, having little in common mentally with humans. He speaks with a dry, drawling voice, riddles and cryptic words being common in his speech. On the outside he is usually curious, polite and calm. Under this is what sets his race apart from humans the most. Emotions are different for him than other common races. There are no positive or negative emotions in a general sense, they are neutral and are involved in the complex personality and mind of a Yorfallian. Emotions are not placed in priority, but for Jean neither is logic. He tends to follow a trait rare for his own race, curiosity. He is a manipulator of sorts, at times malicious and other times playful.
He does not place commitments highly, but doesn't disregard them. Good and evil in his mind are a concept he has little belief in, but the idea of which interests him greatly. He enjoys seeing those who believe greatly in this concept act upon it, and generally manipulates people solely to see such acts occur. He places the value of life rather low, not out of hatred but out of a lack of empathy. Sympathy, guilt, remorse and other such emotions are fairly rare for Yorfallians, and most emotions that can easily control someone aren't near as overpowering for Jean's kind.
Outside of his more deeper traits, he tends to act with chaos, and this often shows in his movements. He has a strange habit of moving in ways similar to a tap dance, and often makes precise, abrupt movements. He is generally not very fluid in his motions to the point of looking like some deranged mannequin but can be fairly coordinated overall.
After discovering his magical affinity, a trait unique only to him among Yorfallians, he gained a great interest in it. His interests and knowledge at this point are undeveloped, but he finds the concept intriguing. It is what currently propels him in learning and developing his abilities.
Overall, he is defined by his nihilistic, albeit positive, outlook on life.
Appearance
The immediate reaction most people get when meeting Jean for the first time, especially among humans than other races, is an almost instinctual response of repulsion. There's a strange wrongness about him, just the way he looks and acts, that sets off a sense of alien-ness about him until they get used to his presence. This can take mere moments to overcome, or it might remain under the surface of their interactions with him forever. This reaction is due to his race's lack of presence in the outside world, Jean being the only of his kind to ever set foot outside of Yorfallia and therefore he is mistaken as a human, but his mismatched appearance disturbs people.
Once they overcome this initial reaction, they'll take in the face values. Jean is a thin man standing at roughly 5' 11". His kind are unlike the other subspecies of humans, being similar only in their overall appearance and structure. His skin is an ivory white and is opaque, showing no scars or blemishes. His hair is black and grows backwards over his ears and down his head to slightly above shoulder length. The hair is slightly thicker than human hair and has a greasy appearance, though this is appearance only.
His eyes lack an iris, only showing a black pupil amidst the whiteness that contracts and expands seemingly to correspond with Jean's thoughts and feelings. His lips are thin and dark purple, as are his gums, while his teeth are a plain white and don't show signs of discolouration. His dark purple tongue is thin and slightly longer than a human's average.
His face is thin and sharp, his skin being hard but smooth and aside from the hair on his head and eyebrows he is hairless across his body. His nails are a moderate shade of purple and he lacks some things standard to humans, such as nipples, and his bellybutton is much smaller and shallower. To other yorfallians, Jean is physically attractive, but other races would probably disagree due to his strange appearance. His clothes may vary sometimes, but he commonly wears a black and white striped leotard along with matching tights, with the addition of black polished tapshoes and white billiards gloves with black fingertips.
He carries with him a retractable cuestick made of a metallic alloy that is light and has the durability of steel. It is roughly four feet in length, is slightly wider at the end and gradually thins towards the tip, and is white with a black tip. He uses this as both an item of general use, such as a walking stick, and as his personal choice of weapon in combat.
His appearance is overall outlandish, mostly colourless and quite cold.
History
Jean comes from Yorfallia, a fair-sized island nation in the middle of nowhere within the Outlands. Whatever contact the outside world has had with it has not gained the attention of higher knowledge and it's existence is almost unknown because of it. The rare Yorfallian might adventure to other places, bringing back whatever material goods or knowledge they gained with them when they return, but they seldom leave the island.
The society is kept together through the simple desire to survive, and banding together and giving and receiving help is logically considered the ideal system. Therefore, it is a very stable place to live, though not perfect. Cold, hard logic is what Yorfallians lead their thoughts with, and if you don't benefit the system then you won't be part of it. Because of the barren state of the island outside of the sparse habitable areas, being forced out of society is essentially a death sentence. Therefore, people make themselves useful, and get to live in return.
Jean himself was abandoned weeks after being born, and was taken in and raised by an orphanage run by adults who did not sympathize too well with children. He eventually ran away from this orphanage at the age of twelve, making his own on the streets for a year and gaining the affinity for survival and self preservation that he mostly follows through with in life from thereafter. He used tricks and manipulation to gain favor with the neighbourhood folk, and used this to avoid detection and consequences of theft and other petty crimes he used to survive on the streets.
Yorfallia had it's own culture, but sometimes brang in parts of others outside of it in the few moments of connection they have had with them. One such aspect was billiards, a sport that became common among townsfolk as an enjoyable and competitive pastime. Jean played this game in open matches with degrees of success, enjoying it as one of his hobbies.
After a year, he was noticed by an elderly man and offered a large sum of money if he were to kill off one of the man's business rivals. He was given knowledge on the target but was provided with very little to aid him in the task outside of this. He took his time in planning it out, inexperienced but having no concerns against murder for profit. In the end he snuck into the man's house at midday, a time when most of Yorfallia was in deep sleep, and murdered the man as he slept. His presence went unnoticed, the body being found in the afternoon bashed and broken, the window in the room was smashed to give entry for the attacker but no other residents heard a thing that would have suggested someone breaking in. The man who was murdered must have woken up during the beating, but again no one heard a sound suggesting anything took place that day. The method of death seemed to be from a savage beating with a blunt object, but the object used was not found anywhere in or near the house.
Having killed his target, Jean returned to the elderly man and was refused payment, receiving the reply that there was no reason why the old man would need to bother giving him money when he was only a street rat. This reply earned the old man death, his screams not leaving the house as Jean took the money he had earned from the old man's corpse, leaving it behind to return to the streets once more. He was however soon found and taken in by an underground group of contract killers and fighters, who did their jobs purely for money, but still accepted Jean's more enthusiastic approach into their services. It was in this group that Jean began to live a more prosperous life, and found his talent and passion for murder and fighting that grew over the years. He revealed his weapon to his cohorts, a simple wooden cuestick he had stolen from a billiards game after he had played in it.
Jean seemed to be a born genius in the art of stealth and silence. His skill was abnormal, and he only grew to discover its mystical nature as he became an adult. It was also at this stage that he had gained his trademark retractable cuestick, and he was almost never seen without it. He grew his social skills and characteristics through interactions with townsfolk, developing his manipulative prowess through his calling for murder. However, his passions would quickly develop past such, and he desired more than what Yorfallia had to offer. His ceiling of interests reaching critical mass, he left the island without the knowledge of his peers and seeked a new world, starting his adventures.
Skills
Intelligent - Jean is highly intelligent due to his race's natural quality, and also carries their strong memory and awareness.
Manipulative - Jean is quick to learn. He is quick to learn how people work. He is quick to learn how to invoke action and reaction, and has no restrain in pursuing such methods.
Emotionally resistant - From euphoria to rage to fear, Jean will remain relatively stable, unless it's an unusual form of emotion as a result of some kind of magic forced upon him.
Billiards Combat - His unique style of weapons fighting. He fights using a pool cue, similar to styles that use pole weapons or staves, but relies more on his natural agility and unpretictability when using it to perform hit and run attacks and confuse his opponent than straight up fighting.
Covert - He knows how to hide his intentions and movements from people, that includes being steathly and sneaking up on people.
Abilities
Dancing Fast - Jean is exceptionally fast, and can cross great distances in a short time, so long as he doesn't exhaust himself. He has a strange method of movement however, which looks like a rapid tap dance that allows him to trick opponents into where his feet will move to, but is very susceptible to being thrown off course with painful results due to his great momentum. Also, his movements are very loud due to his tapdancing shoes, which seems counterproductive for someone who used to be an assassin. This speed is not actually limited to his legs, as his weapon strikes and upper body movements are just as impressive. The level of his speed is equal to 2x that of a normal human's.
Absolute Silence - He has the ability to control sound to some degree, or rather cancel it out with magic, making absolute silence take over the area around him. The actual size of the area he can affect begins at about the size of a living room, and the effect can only originate from his body, he can't throw the effect to a distant location. He uses this when being sneaky, by cancelling the sound he makes, but can also capture nearby enemies in it to deny them their sense of hearing and throw them off their game, since he is more accustomed to fighting without being able to hear and they won't be expecting it. This magic doesn't seem to make any sense to other mages, and apparently only works because Jean wants it to, following no elemental or otherwise sensical method of operation.
Mantra Mentality - Jean has a strange way of thinking, following complex patterns that are constructed from countless strands of thought to form a tangable idea in his head. This is native to the Yorfallian brain, and is the reason for their high intelligence. He has developed a mental technique that creates a permanent construction of thought in his mind that is stored in his memory, and when accessed can be run through like a program on a computer. These mantras are initiated by speaking a word or phrase tagged to that mantra while thinking of it, and can range from twisting the face into a predetermined expression that will be the same each time the name of the mantra is said, to a called attack that would be far too complicated and specific for any normal person to perform. Such attacks require a large deal of preparation however, and often take several mantras one after the other to succeed due to the limitless scenarios they have to be used in. This is why Jean relies on hit and run and stealth, because in a straight up fight he cannot take the time to initiate such complex fight patterns in the heat of the moment. Due to the keyword in his mantra, and having to say it out loud and trigger a response in his brain through sound, it doesn't combine with his absolute silence magic very well and can give away his position.
Equipment
Cue stick - A metal, retractable cue stick which is made of a light metal alloy similar in properties to stainless steel. Other than being sturdy and easily concealable, it has no remarkable traits and Jean relies on his mantras and speed to make full use of it as a weapon.
Other than his clothes, described in his appearance, and his gold, he never takes anything else with him while travelling.