Yay its Wednesday! Time for a new RP Prompt. Okay, I've been trying to develop one of my new characters, but for this one, I am going to do it as my main Taboo (yes I do love the fact I have that name. ) I know her personality pretty good and I think I can answer this one.
Once again Lady C, your story was touching and inspiring. Very well done.
What is your characters most cherished wish?
Courtney Williams better know to the mystical community of Paragon City as the Sorceress Taboo stood outside the door to Paragon University. In her several year career as Taboo in the city she's faced Circle of Thorn cultists and demons, Tsoo sorcerers, the vile creations of the Banished Pantheon, Carnival of Shadows and a dozen other world and in some cases, dimensional spanning threats. None of those numerous forces of darkness had scared Taboo quite as much as standing before these doors did. A cool afternoon breeze caressed the red head as her azure eyes took in the doorway like it was a portal to the nether realm.
It had taken Courtney the better part of 8 years, between combating the city's various villains working on her own arcane projects and consulting with the M.A.G.I. offices, to complete her phd in both literature and history, and get her doctorate in archeology. She had a passion for the subjects, and she had been determined to complete her education despite all the problems life seemed to throw her way.
Courtney took a deep breath and pushed open the doors, the students passing by, other Professors, and school adminastrators pass by, each heading to a class or office. Courtney immediately made her way to the ladies room.
One barrier crossed. she murmured to herself as she went in and looked herself over in the mirror. Conservative look in place, a nice white blazer, black shirt and white pants, with black pumps completed her look. Her red hair was neatly styled and her glasses gave her a pragmatic look she thought. She took another deep breath, picked up her small book bag and made her way to the dean's office. Although she knew her criteria by heart already, protocol was protocol.
The second barrier a meeting with the dean was brief and now Courtney found herself walking down the hallway towards the classroom. Her stomach was an ever tightening knot, and she could feel the the eyes of the students in the hall on her. Being just over 30 Thirty three is just over thirty right? she thought to herself, she wasn't really too far off student age, well she liked to tell herself that anyway. The Admissions officer, Mr Lenk, walked beside her, letting her know some of her duties as well as where the class was currently. Courtney only half paid attention to him. She could read, write and speak a half dozen dead languages and as Taboo has visited a real ancient Roman city, she was fairly certain she could cover the History curriculum.
As the got to the class Mr Lenk shook her hand and wished her luck. Courtney stood at the door for what seemed like hours, but was in reality only a few moments, this was it, her chance at last to teach. A dream that took what seemed like a lifetime to achieve. A slow smile spread across her face and as she entered the classroom, wood finished walls, books arrayed in several neat bookcases and about 15 students, some sitting, some standing, all eyes turned towards her.
Good afternoon, she said pleasantly as she made her way to the large desk, My name's Professor Williams.
It took some time to really find this character's fondest dream, a simple one really, teaching. Looking forward to next week
((One of my best friends from school was named Courtney Williams so this was kind of a creepy but good read, Thanks Mind and Oooh Taboo damned good name grab!))
((This I hope will be an introduction of a character I am making, hopefully with on going prompts I can tell his origin story as well as it is my goal to create a sub-story consisting of my two characters, filling in the gaps as I go along each week.))
The day was fine in the small country town of Brook Haven, the sun was shining between fluffy white clouds, there was a cool northerly wind which touched the sweat which clung to Jakes back, cooling and refreshing him with every breeze that danced through the dappled sugar maple trees.
It was late summer in the quiet mountain town, some would say it was coming on autumn but the warm temperatures of the extended Indian summer told a hard working body a different tale. Jake mopped his brow with the back of his hand while griped in the other callused paw of his left he held his much loved but faded Red Sox ball cap faded to a red so light it was nearly white, not un-like the knees of his well fitted jeans.
Stooping once more and picking up the log which had fallen, he righted the chunk upon the old iron wood stump and then in one fluid motion raising the double headed axe back and then down again he split the log with practiced ease. Jake went on like this for hours, corded muscles working while he stood stooping and sweating, in the late afternoon sun splitting the wood which had once been the large cedar tree on the back of his property into fragrant fire wood for the oncoming winter nights.
Jake had enjoyed the storm which had taken down the old tree, the driving rain pounding on the tin roof of the old farm house had been a loud but soothing cacophony, the wild howling of the fierce wind had thrilled his reckless heart and when the lights had finally gone out he had reveled in lighting one of the old beeswax candles he had found in the dry goods pantry and staying up late into the night he had read Hawthorn and Keats drinking a rather nice single malt scotch which he had squirreled away with him when he had moved from the city.
Jake was still a young man, only thirty two if his mother was to be believed, but he had felt much older these past few months. After his break up with Elise he had felt like his life had come to a stand still, she had been like life to him, all fire and warmth and thrilling madness. They where great together everyone had said, though he later found out most of them had said so insincerely, he took her to plays, the opera and the ballet because he enjoyed them just as much as a seat at Wrigley field or at the Boston Garden. He was a passionate writer, his column was a political who’s who for the globe and there was talk of his little weekly article going into national syndication.
They had moved in together after a few months of dating, his sister had told him it was to soon to make such a big step and deep down he knew she was right, but Elise had insisted, saying that if they where meant to be together living together would prove it. So he took pains to make sure Elise felt at home in his Chestnut Street Apartment, clearing space for her in his closet, getting rid of, well hiding his girly magazines in the basement, and what had pained him most of all building a dog house in the fenced in backyard for Shelby his seven year old Australian sheep dog, to whom Elise was allergic and could no longer sleep in the house while Elise lived there.
At first she had said she loved the charming old cobble stone street, and the brightly painted flower boxes on the window sills. Eventually however Elise, sneezing and watery eyed, came to criticize the “Bourgeois self importance” which she said their neighbors had and how the dog “Has to go, or I go!” Jake had laughed at first at the idea of old Mrs. Madison and the Women’s College Club in powdered wigs and Jake had asked his sister Jenn who lived in a nice dog friendly family suburb if she would take care of Shelby for a little while and he would visit them both on the weekends. Elise had gotten her way at last and he had locked up his apartment and moved in with Elise instead.
In the end however she had said they needed space, that she needed someone who excited her and that she was miserable in what she called her “Conformity”. In short, someone who was more like she was, wild and untamed, who drank wine in the afternoon instead of bourbon at night, who didn’t insist on smoking his cigar in the posh upscale café’s and eating steak at all the new restaurants. She said she needed someone who could share her interests, keep up with the newest feminine authors, argue about the merits of O’Keefe for hours and who understood what it meant to really struggle in a mans world.
In short Elise had left him for a woman, someone she had met in her department at work who taught African American women’s studies at NYU. Jake had thought he had done everything right, he had always put the seat down, he did the dishes and even liked to cook, he had introduced her to all his family and friends, he had been dedicated and adoring to her all the years they had been together. He had known Elise was Bi-curious when they had begun dating five years ago, and he had thought he was a modern guy, but damn it had been a blow to his male ego to be replaced so easily by a few inches of molded plastic and Gertrude Stein novels.
So tucking his tail between his legs he moved out of her apartment and back into his own, picking up Shelby at his sisters along the way. At first he did every thing you’re supposed to do after splitting up with your significant other, he forwarded his mail, he listened to too much James Brown, he tried to get used to sleeping in the middle of his bed again and he drank to much whiskey. He thought he was doing ok at getting over Elise but when he had seen her and Camille out at what had been his favorite bar one night only a few months after the break up, it was then he knew he had to get a change of scene. So he quit his job, rented out his apartment and came here, to Brook Haven to escape the memory of their life together.
When he had told Harry about his plan to put his column on hold and to work on his novel full time, he thought Harry was going to choke on his nicorette gum, or bludgeon him to death with his decorative rotary phone. Harry tried everything in his arsenal to keep his top writer from committing professional suicide and throwing away his career as a journalist. Everything from threats, monetary bribes to flat out begging and coercion, they had argued for months while Jake made the final arrangements with the realtor over the price of the colonial era farm house and the seventy acres of farm land and deep ever green woods which surrounded it. In the end all of Harry’s pleading couldn’t stop Jake once he had made up his mind and from clearing out his desk at the Globe and the day he had signed the mortgage papers on that dotted line Jake felt a sense of tremendous relief.
He had always wanted to be a novelist his entire life; it was his most cherished wish. He used to pour over Byron, Hawthorn, London and Keats like they where old friends and imagine what it must have been like to fight along side Hemmingway and Cummings in WWI, and while he loved the life style and excitement of his journalism career he was a lot like Elise after all. He had tried to fit into societies mold and what was expected of him yet he remained unhappy with his life in Boston, to him it had been shallow and he had always felt unfulfilled.
Jake knew what he was doing in moving to New York, knew in the marrow of his bones that this move was just what he needed, and that the old farm house in the small town of Brook Haven would mark a new and better chapter in his life and hopefully a new beginning.
This is a weekly article, delivered to you every Wednesday. These articles are intended to be a fun exercise as well as a good resource for role-players to explore Character Development so please feel free to post your own characters reaction to the weekly prompt. So be sure to stay tuned to this blog for future installments!
What is your characters most cherished wish?
The blur of burning yellow and orange tree’s moved swiftly by the windows of her car as she sped down route 87 in northern New York on a beautiful Thursday afternoon in late September. The air was crisp and pure in this part of the country and the rolling green hillsides where dotted with sunny dairy farms and picturesque small towns which had not changed since the horse and buggy days of their founding. Thick evergreen forests settled between the long expanses of pastures and corn fields and rising high above it all was the splendor of the Adirondack Mountains.
As the landscape slid by a soft sigh escaped Serena’s lips, lately her face had been set in pensive and anxious lines, now her face relaxed into a soft smile. Her dark blue eyes scanned the road ahead eagerly for the first sign of the blue gray waters of the Lake and as she turned off the highway onto the town road which crested and turned down a large hill the first magnificent sight of Kings Bay and the sleepy town of Brook Haven arrested her.
The small town stretched out before her, the brick store fronts of main street, the small utilitarian High School with its perfectly manicured sports field, and row after row of maple tree lined streets where quaint homes from the many eras of Brook Havens existence had been built up around the old logging mill and railroad depot which had made the town its fortune. The two granite stone bridges which she knew to be lined with old fashioned wrought iron lamp posts, led the way in and out of the town, running over the two tributary rivers which emptied their cold and clean mountain water into the basin of Kings Bay while the sweep of the patchwork fields on the outskirts of town fell away to give rise to the undaunted dark forest and the highway to civilization from whence she came.
It had been nearly twenty years since Serena had visited Brook Haven, and the population had grown to a staggering two thousand warm bodies since. New faces and old gawked at her as she made her way through town, but Serena was blissfully unaware as she always was about her effect on people. A few of the local boys stared at her as she drove her restored cherry red 1973 Pontiac firebird trans am down main street, looking for a parking space in front of Keatons grocery store and movie rental. So when the door opened and the six foot tall dark haired Amazon of a woman got out of the car their Jaws dropped to the floor.
Growing up next to her best friend Elizabeth White, she long ago figured, what woman in her humbled senses could compare to the blond bombshell, so as Serena stretched the miles of road out of her jean clad legs, and wriggled her toes in the beloved cowboy boots which she had gotten from her father in New Mexico, she smiled to the soft humorless old men who sat out in front of the store playing a game of checkers whom eyed her with suspicious regard, and waving in greeting to the almost flabbergasted Maude and Fred Keaton who owned the store for years and who had had the good business sense to branch out from dry goods and ten penny nails to sell fresh local produce and had a five movies for five nights for five dollars movie rental price which Serena figured would keep her sane on her lonely winter nights when nothing else in the small quiet town proved to be more interesting.
In a small town like Brook Haven Serena knew there would be very little to tempt her away from her work, and she knew she had to take some time off. It had been a hard decision at the time, for she had truly hated to leave Lizzy and Pearl behind her, but with a promise to send for them both soon, once the old house had been fixed up enough to be inhabitable for them all and Pearls winter vacation started in November, Serena hoped all the necessary improvements would be made and her new lab would be functional come next spring.
Though she had hated to make such a hard decision, as it would be the longest that Serena and Lizzy had been apart since they had been children, Serena knew it was one that she made for the best. A singular occurrence had caused her to give up her original plan of staying in the city while her Grandmothers things had been packed up and the house locked away. An occurrence which happened only a few days after she had arrived at the house on Mt. Vernon Street when only days before she had learned that her beloved Grandmother Ryan was dying of pancreatic cancer.
She had fallen down the stairs late one night, a silly mistake in retrospect, while making her way from her bedroom to get a drink of water for her Grandmother from the kitchen below. The flight of stairs had seemed to tilt underneath her as she stumbled sleepily down their steep pitch and as she tumbled down head over teakettle it was only by the miracle of her genetics alone, which she reflected blithely when she had stopped at the cracked landing below, her body twisted at odd angles that how lucky she was that she hadn’t been killed. Fore, to her ecstatic pleasure she had noticed as she was picking herself up from off the floor that in all her tumbling that she was beginning to bruise!
Her muscles where failing and for someone whom had lived most of her life with strength unparalleled to even that of a machine or a behemoth, this small accident had changed how she looked at her lifestyle forever, and what she meant to do about it. So while she fought tooth and nail in school to cover up her oddities and to fit in with the rest of her classmates, a young Serena Jordan had been plotting for a way to save herself from the burden of her own mutant powers.
It had been the work of Serena’s entire life to reverse her mutation. For as long as she could remember she had wanted nothing more but to be a normal little girl with normal problems. Sam D had begun her training early, noticing in his daughter the same healthy flush which had once been a sign of her mothers’ gift for healing. The little girl never got sick, never broke a bone and always excelled in sports. She had always been active, healthy and resilient, some had said she was oblivious to pain but this was soon dismissed when they saw the little girl cringe and cry whenever she had to receive her childhood immunization shots.
When in her first year of biology she had studied a sample of her own DNA and matching it to the records on file for her mother and her biological father Johnny Phoenix, an Apache Indian from a tribe deep in Southern New Mexico, Serena realized that mutation would have been her lot in life no matter what. Her only consolation was that she was only lucky to have had the good fortune to receive Johnny’s looks and not his pyrokinetic powers.
Serena was not ashamed of what her parents’ genetics had given her, but she knew that while she possessed her abilities she would never live a life containing the things which she truly wanted for herself. She wanted a home and a family, children and a dog; she longed to live in a place where she was simply known as a doctor, someone who helped mankind to heal and not someone to act as society’s meat shield from those whom she could only detest. She wanted in short to live a life of her choosing, where she could act as a hero as any other civil servant, not one obligated to live in fear and paranoia from insane master villains and arch enemies bent on world domination who would bring harm to her friends and family.
So she had begun working on the serum, that magic button which would reverse her mutated powers forever, and now the injections where working, who knew what the side effects would be? What had started out as her dearest wish as a child had turned into a dangerous obsession which she had already risked and lost to much for. An all encompassing dream which had swallowed most of her adult life and now all of her hard work had started to pay off!
However the down side of her discovery was that her once perfect control of her immense strength and the impervious quality of her body as well as her other powers where now completely unpredictable. She knew in her heart of hearts she would get worse as the cascade effect progressed and that right now she was more of a danger than ever to those she loved. So she had taken time off to come here, far away from where she might be tempted to use her powers again. Where she could lay low as Serena Ryan and concentrate on finalizing a job well done.
So packing up some of her things, and locking up her lab she set out early that morning from the city, toward her Grandfather Ryans summer house on the lake of northern New York where the air was clean and the gentle crashing of the waves against the high jagged cliffs could lull her into slumber every night. She could take out her Grandfathers sailboat the “Wild Irish Rose” and watch the rise and fall of the moon and stars from its deck dreaming about a future in which she was a normal human being and nothing more.