Post by CHRISTOPHE FEUILLY on Feb 25, 2013 17:47:07 GMT -5
[atrb=border,0,true][atrb=style, background-color: f9f9f9; border: #1f4579 solid 10px; width: 420px; padding: 15 5 15 5px;] At the end of the day you're another day colder FULL NAME: Christophe Feuilly NICKNAMES: HERITAGE: French AGE: 23 GROUP: ABC CANON: Yes PLAYBY: Ben Barnes ----- PERSONALITY: Intelligent and determined, despite the poor odds of his background, Feuilly is in many ways a self-made man. He has a gifted mind, and the patience to be able to teach himself almost anything if he tries for long enough. There are significant gaps in his education—the result of being entirely self-taught with limited access to materials—all of which he would like to fill, though his special interest has become the history and politics of revolution. Naturally something of an idealist, in daily life he's far more pragmatic. His flights of fancy are seen through his constant talk of revolutionary history, and to a degree in the designs he paints on his fans—though in these he is limited by the instructions he's given. He is generally patient, and has a good heart. He prefers to see the good in people despite the hardship he grew up in and his continuing poverty. He is kind and quite generous, willing to give even from his low wages. Had Feuilly been born into a different situation, his intelligence and drive could have made him a successful student and helped him establish a career. As it is, they've made him a proficient--though not exceptional--fan-maker and pushed him toward more revolutionary ideas. APPEARANCE: Too poor to purchase new or fashionable clothing, Feuilly generally dresses like the worker he is and has few other options. He does his best to keep himself and his clothing clean, though this is of course not always possible given his living and working conditions. He is young and roughly the same age as most of the student members of the Friends of the ABC, despite his differing life experience. He is only of average or perhaps even somewhat lower height; this is unsurprising, perhaps, given his background. He's reasonably strong, though most of his skill is more toward his fine motor skills for fanmaking. GOALS: Feuilly's main goal is to see the establishment of a republic in France and the rest of the world. He believes in the self-determination of nations, especially those dismantled or overtaken by the imperialist aims of other countries. For himself, his goal is to become an educated man. This drive to educate himself has far less to do with dissatisfaction with his material conditions than it does with a belief that knowledge will raise him beyond what he was born to be and help him make a change in the world. HISTORY: Born to working-class parents and orphaned at a young age, Feuilly's memories of having a family are distant and faded. Most, tied more to sensations than to conscious thoughts, revolve around a life in a small, dark room with little to entertain him or occupy his time. His father died in an accident when he was almost three; after the birth of an infant daughter, his mother found herself leaving both children as words of the state (as most French orphans were after 1801) with the promise that she would return for them, despite the papers she had signed. She never did. He found out, long after, that it hadn't been a deliberate break of faith—the woman had died of disease before she had any hope of retracing her children. The infant sister died before she could even be placed with a wet nurse. The boy eventually found himself placed with a fan-maker, though the man expected him to work hard with little reward. This childhood meant that, although the boy's physical needs were generally met, his mind was rarely exercised to its full power and his education was neglected. Religious instruction was provided from time to time, but although the boy was hungry for knowledge, as he grew he found the instruction incomplete and not entirely appealing. It wasn't that he didn't believe what he was told, but simply that he felt there had to be far more to any given story. What fascinated him, however, was the way people could produce words that flowed together while staring at a page. All he saw, sneaking and climbing about to catch a glimpse of the same page, was a collection of black lines and dots and curling symbols. Some struck his fancy, but they were meaningless to him. He felt he was staring at some secret code that had to be deciphered, and was fascinated. Around the same time, he discovered in himself a talent for imitating patterns he saw with whatever writing implement he could find. On gathered scraps of paper, he began to practice. Fascinated, he began to take the ruined scraps and improperly mixed paints to practice for himself. He enjoyed the work and his skills improved, even with his poor resources. By the time he was twelve, he had taught himself through no small effort to read. He found, to his surprise and wonder, that it wasn't so difficult once he knew what the letters sounded like. It astonished his young mind what he was capable of discovering by use of these strange symbols that were becoming more and more familiar to him. He taught himself to write by copying back down the words he found on whatever printed material he could find. He devoured anything that came into his hands, first haltingly as his literacy was incomplete and then with greater and greater fluency. He felt for the first time that he had some power over his life, and was exhilarated to realize he could learn about most anything simply by reading about it. The difficulty, of course, was in obtaining the material; mostly, what he could afford were pamphlets handed out for free or nearly so and the occasional newspaper. Books were things to be stared at and coveted, but far beyond the wages his labor brought in. As he grew he found himself taking more small jobs for small wages, working longer. What material he did find gave him a fascination with other countries and questions of their independence, which he—in the romantic mind of a young boy whose own life offered more hardship than adventure—equated with his own struggle. At fifteen, Feuilly decided that the path to a future beyond a life as only a simple laborer led through Paris. By the end of his teens he knew perfectly well that his costs to the state through his childhood meant he was supposed to go into the army, but instead decided to use his still rudimentary knowledge of fan-making and set off to find work. Paris was not and could not be his first destination; he did not have the money to get there. His path did eventually lead him to Paris, where was lucky enough to find work. He rents a room that he shares with several other workers. His work as a fanmaker unsurprisingly requires of him long hours with fairly poor pay. ----- ALIAS: Ashley AGE: 21 GENDER: Female OTHER CHARACTERS: Henri Roquefeuil-Blanquefort HOW DID YOU FIND US: RPG-D ROLEPLAY SAMPLE: Have an Henri post! The forest was silent at nightfall, and in that moment he was transported back to his childhood and the thousands of meanings this land had held for him since that time. The wind was soft, warm as spring had entrenched itself in the French countryside. Henri closed his eyes for a moment, pretending the world around him would fall away and strip him down to what he had been so many years ago... A moment of weakness. Why should he long for that world? Broken, fallen, a collection of all the things that could make a life short and nasty. And if giving his life, sacrificing his very soul meant the destruction of all that was and the birth of a new world, a new life for others... then he was bound, both by honor and ethics, to make that sacrifice. Even if it hurt him, standing in silence among the quickly darkening trees. A thousand years could pass and the forest would still be familiar to him. As a boy it had been the battlefield for countless imaginary wars; now the only difference was that the blood was real and the exhaustion far more acute. His imagination had so little to do with the actual reality that, had his principles and ideals been weaker, he might have given up. Gone home. But this now was home. It was getting late, and he would have to be up with the dawn as always. He'd never minded such early mornings, but as they dragged on to be united with late nights they wore on him, knitting with the stresses of command and any internal anxiety that beset him to fray his nerves and paint dark circles under his eyes. There were days now when he scarcely recognized himself in the mirror as he shaved. And yet, Helene... It was a miracle that she had found him again, he was almost certain of that. Who but God could have willed such a thing to happen and made it so? She, despite all trials, remained the spark of beauty and something far, far more that she had been even from their first days as friends in these same woods... He whispered a prayer for her protection, and listened to the silence of the forest until it was broken by the sound of footsteps. His hand went to the pistol on his belt, and he turned toward the noise. And the shirt on your back doesn't keep out the chill |
