Post by LEON NOEL on Mar 17, 2012 19:14:01 GMT -5
...leon reinier noel*
*mirror, mirror, on the wall...*
[/size]*mirror, mirror, on the wall...*
...basics*
name Leon Reinier Noel
nickname Lee, very rarely
age 26
gender Male
grade Adult
hometown New London, CT
sexuality Straight
personification Magic Mirror - Snow White
status Awake
face claim Joseph Gordon Levitt
...appearance*
hair color Dark brown, kept at varying lengths, all dependent upon his mental state; having his hair longer takes more effort, and if he's going to take pride in the way he looks, he has to keep it neat and properly styled. Cutting it off would probably be a sign of frustration and general pissiness with his situation, since it's something he can absolutely control and it's one less thing to frustrate himself over if he has other problems bothering him.
eye color Dark brown, just like his hair, and if you were to just glance, you’d never know that he was blind. The telling part is the fact that even though his eyes will still even move as though they’re still trying to see whoever he’s paying attention to, they’re unfocused and he’ll still look as though he’s staring past you, even as he talks. Sometimes, he doesn’t even bother doing anything more than inclining his head in the direction of his audience, which will make the dead stare a little more unusual and possibly unsettling. He usually carries sunglasses with him, though he doesn’t always choose to wear them, to spare others the discomfort.
build Leon, being former military and from a lifestyle that was so very demanding, still can’t seem to leave at least some of it behind him. Even though he isn’t doing the dangerous, challenging things he used to, he visits the gym regularly and has maintained a very lean, strong frame that will definitely fool you if you take him at a single glance fully dressed. He’s easy to underestimate, but he’s done everything he could to stay as sharp as is possible.
height 5’10”
clothing style Pride plays a lot in his decisions and the way he comes across to people, making him put out the effort to dress well, even if he can’t see it. He doesn’t always go so far as to always wear suits and the like, but he’ll make sure that he’s always neat when he’s leaving the house, and tends to wear a lot of neutral colors so that he can dress himself without worrying that his clothes don’t match, leaning more towards grays and blacks than browns and tans. Having Mercy around tends to add a bit of color into his wardrobe, but that’s safe because she wouldn’t let him leave the house looking like a child dressing themselves. She knows how he feels about his appearance, and she’s never seemed to have any reason to disagree, considering her own preference that he look put-together. His sense of style wouldn’t be bad at all if it wasn’t very much also about his own insecurities in the life he lives everyday. The more afraid he is that people will look at him funny for his disability, the more determined he’ll be to give them no reason to pity him or think he's incapable of doing for himself. If he's dressed all casual, he's probably feeling all kinds of secure and doesn't care, which makes for a much happier Leon.
distinctive traits Besides being a show of his mental state, cutting his hair has the additional effect of showing off a scar on his scalp from the head injury that took his vision. He’s never seen it, but he’d be both glad to know that it isn’t too big and obvious to others and pissed that a little mark like that is all that remains of a hit that caused so much more damage. He has other scars he picked up in the field, but he keeps those covered up under his nice clothes to avoid questioning looks or inquiries; he’s been around, and before he lost his sight, he’d been involved in and seen some serious shit.
...personal*
personality
Leon, all in all, walks a fine line between who he was and who he’s turning into because of his disability and the strange new ability that appeared at about the same time. He’s tried since the injury to be the man that everyone expects him to be (including himself), but in some cases, that’s essentially impossible and that frustrates him. He’s used to being a confident, capable young man who didn’t mind aid from others, but didn’t need it; that being why he was so okay with others pitching in, his confidence in his own abilities making it clear to him that they were doing it because they wanted to and not because he was weak and needed the assistance. Now, the capable young man is broken, and it’s not entirely unusual for him to need assistance with simple tasks, such as cooking. The worst part about that was that he used to be good at it, and to enjoy it. That’s just an example of the little things that mean so much more when you suddenly have trouble doing them, and though he’s pushed himself and adapted shockingly well for someone in his situation (SERE training, man), he’s not satisfied. He essentially wants to be doing all of the same things that he used to do, and with the same level of skill, which is obviously impossible. Just because he can’t doesn’t mean he doesn’t want it.
If it wasn’t plain by that alone, he has high standards, especially for himself, and they may have gotten higher since his vision died. Some things that he wasn’t nearly as uptight about are now absolutes for him, including ensuring that he looks more than presentable whenever he leaves the house and asking for help very rarely. He really has to be at the point that he’s hopelessly stuck to ask, which only fuels more frustration at his lack of ability to deal with whatever he’s trying to do. He tends to try not to get too pissy about it, but in the end, he can’t usually help it and feels that way, anyway. Fortunately, it doesn’t linger too long, just as long as it takes for the sting to his pride to fade, and then he’s back to being sharp and serious. He can be quick to anger, especially if certain nerves are hit, but he fortunately isn’t too explosive about it. He just gets snarky and sarcastic, only sometimes raising his voice, and if he’s mad enough, he’ll just leave rather than hang around and have it all get worse, especially if it’s someone he’d never physically fight with, like Mercy. It takes a rare person to actually have him come to blows out of anger instead of a calculated move on his part, so it’s safe to say that he’d leave before that ever happened.
Although he comes across as being rather serious if you’re just meeting him on his own, he has the habit of relaxing and opening up a bit more with someone he’s comfortable with present, like Mercy. A lot of his closed-off feeling is him being insecure about his surroundings and people he doesn’t know, so he shuts down and gathers information so that he isn’t potentially off-kilter later. With Mercy around, he can ease up on that a little, and then his smiles, laughter and jokes will come a lot easier and with less of that feeling like he’s holding back. He can be a really nice guy and deep down, he cares and has a good heart, but he’s not about wearing it on his sleeve for someone to crush it. He’s survived too much for that, and if he counts you as one of his friends, that’s not something you want to casually screw up. He might not forgive and forget.
Leon’s not entirely aware that he’s playing host to the Magic Mirror, though if someone explained it, he’d probably agree that it makes about as much sense as any other theory once he was finished dismissing it as ridiculous that a fairy tale character was an actual real spirit. He knows that something really weird is going on and he absolutely hates the off-kilter feeling he gets from the sudden compulsion to answer questions truthfully and the even more sudden images and knowledge he’ll take in so that he CAN answer those questions. He doesn’t like feeling like a magic 8 ball, and even if he was always a pretty honest guy and he’s gotten better at shutting up instead of answering questions that people didn’t actually want answers to, it makes him crazy sometimes and he’s also sure he looks like a lunatic whenever it happens. It’s bad enough that he’s the blind guy without being the crazy, weird blind guy. That he’s always right when it happens only creeps people out more.
Too bad they don’t realize that he’s just as creeped out.
past
Leon Noel was born into a poor family and a single mom. His father made the attempt to show up here and there in the first four or so years of his life (every six months or so, as though his intentions were just to disrupt whatever was going on in the household) before disappearing entirely after getting his ass beat by the boyfriend Leon's mother had at the time of his last visit. Even being a small child, Leon wasn't sad to see him go because he'd never been around enough to make his presence anything more than curious and somewhat dreaded. Leon's mother meant well, she honestly did, but she hadn't been ready for a child and certainly hadn't been prepared to make the life changes necessary to be a good mother. She liked to party and have fun, so while she wasn't mean-spirited, she simply wasn't all that responsible. She always had a boyfriend who would usually stay around for a few months and typically spent a lot of time at their little apartment before they had some blow-out fight and broke-up. Then would start the reconciliation dance, which his mother would only sometimes fall for.
Because his mother really couldn't be trusted to take constant care of him (and she tried when he was a baby and a toddler because he'd cry, then continued to try as he got old enough to ask her for lunch or whatever else he needed), he learned how to feed himself, bathe himself and generally just keep his own little life going smoothly at a startling young age. Fortunately, his mother had been smart enough (for both of their sakes) that she'd attempted to create and keep a schedule throughout his short life, so he understood and then adhered to a bath schedule and the idea that the house needed to be kept up. She certainly helped when she'd crawl out of bed at 2 in the afternoon with a horrific hangover from the night before, doing dishes or sometimes making a decent dinner if she felt well enough for it by then. Some of her boyfriends were even good people, playing with Leon, showing him 'manly' things like how to change a lock on the front door (the last boyfriend still had a key and broke in the night before), change a tire (he certainly couldn't do it himself at 6 years old when he learned, but he was a very smart child, so he understood the concept and the instructions, and even helped where he could), make easy meals, and play sports.
Other boyfriends taught him the things he never wanted to do, like drink himself into a raging asshole, hit women and children, and break things. Sometimes, the same man would teach him both types of things, and Leon was a very, very quick learner. By the time he was eight years old, he'd developed something dangerously close to what would be called 'military bearing' later in his life, the ability to stand stock still and take abuse without even your expression changing. It didn't take him long to realize that yelling back, crying, making promises or any real response at all didn't do him any good, so he made as little as he could. It was with this man that he learned that yelling and hitting wasn't the only thing someone could do to hurt you, because this man hated it when he'd just stand there and stare, even if he teared up a little, because he saw it as defiance. To a point, he was right, that's exactly what it was, so he figured out another way to get to the little kid.
The next time he got pissed at Leon, the child's mother was at work. He'd made too much noise coming inside after getting off the bus and the guy had a killer hangover, so he naturally came out of the bedroom with a desire to scream and yell (making his hangover worse, but who was going to tell him that?). Leon dropped his backpack and stood very, very still, waiting with a patience beyond his eight years for the man to finish his ranting, and did nothing more than flinch away when he was grabbed by the arm and given a good shake. The difference from the usual was that he wasn't released or even struck; he was dragged. He started squirming as they hit the doorway to his mother's bedroom (he wasn't supposed to go in there) and actually started to panic when he was forced inside and then into the closet that was packed full of clothes, shoes and everything else his mother didn't want laying around the room. It meant that there was about enough room for him to be cramped in there and maybe stand up if he wanted to be sandwiched between clothes. The closet really wasn't very big, and just as suddenly as he'd been shoved in there, the door was slammed shut. Worse, it wouldn't open.
What he didn't know was that the boyfriend had shoved a dresser just far enough down the wall of the small room that it kept the door from being able to open, then gone to get a beer and sit in front of the television. Leon's mother didn't get home until after 9pm, and it was just before she arrived that the dresser was moved and the door opened. The man hadn't even waited for him to come out, just opened the door and walked away, leaving him to his own devices. For pretty obvious reasons, he crawled out and disappeared into his room, not bothering with homework or dinner. When his mother got home, she checked in on him and found him already in bed, so she didn't bug him. This happened again the next day and then the day after, so he learned not piss the guy off whenever he could prevent it. He didn't tell, because he was told he'd be left in the closet all night if he did, and he honestly believed it would happen.
His mother found out after just a few days of this, only because it was Leon's birthday and she'd gone into work just for a little while to check in and help out for a bit before coming back home to surprise him with dinner and a cake she'd made while he was in school. She walked in to find her boyfriend in his familiar spot on the couch, beer in hand, and didn't think much of his shocked expression and questions about why she was home so early, but he was up as soon as she started heading to her room to drop her work things off. Imagine her surprise when she found the dresser moved down the wall to the closet door, and especially when she asked why it was there only to hear her son start screaming for her from inside.
The police were required to remove that man from their house that night and Leon wasn't the one to change the locks, but it was too little, too late. He was even more paranoid of every man his mother brought home after that than he already had been, and there wasn't a damn thing that could make him go anywhere near any of the closets in any place they lived in until he was well into his teens.
For all of the trouble that was his home life, Leon did surprisingly well in school. He was perhaps over-disciplined, considering how much 'respect' some of his mother's boyfriends had required, and he was certainly mature and very capable for his age. He was thirteen when he was walking home from school and found one of his female teachers with a flat on the side of the road and changed it for her, using information he'd learned years previously as though it had been the day before, and that was just the way he was. By his teen years, he was getting excellent grades because he refused to be thought of as being some kind of loser (he had way too much pride for that), and he was taking care of the house and making dinner for his mother to come home from work to. College seemed like a natural next step to his teachers, but Leon disagreed. They certainly didn't have the kind of money he needed for college and thousands of dollars in school loans wasn't his idea of fun (even if he probably could have gotten scholarships). When he graduated, he simply changed his hours at the mechanic's shop he'd been working part-time at, getting full-time without question because he was damn good at it, but he did still graduate and his mom insisted he ‘be a kid for once’ and not only go to his graduation, but go to some of the festivities later on. That was why he ended up involved in the SafeGrad night, even though he thought it sounded stupid and waaaay too chaperone-heavy for him. Unsurprisingly, a lot of the kids from his school agreed, so they figured out their own ways around it.
It was that night that he met Mercy, a girl from the fancy private school in Greenwich that was hanging around with a bunch of people from his school. He didn’t stick with them entirely, but every time he stopped to chat with one of them or got yanked over as he walked past, he caught Mercy’s eye and had to struggle to behave totally normally, like he hadn’t seen her. Obviously, it didn’t work, since they hooked up that night, but she seemed satisfied and he sure as hell was, so it didn’t make much difference to him. He figured he’d never see the Greenwich princess again, but whereas he’d never seen her in town before, she suddenly started showing up. It was so casual, the way she’d just be there doing other things, glance up and he’d see her, but he wasn’t stupid; he might not have instantly realized that she was only hanging out in the hopes of running into him, but he figured it out, and that was when he gave a little laugh, offered her his number and asked for hers. Just to make their next rendezvous a little less dependent on chance. They continued getting together and hooking up to the point that he wasn’t actually a hook-up anymore, and fast-approaching boyfriend-status, which was a tricky subject, and he knew it. The way she’d gone about it, especially in the beginning, made him almost positive she had a boyfriend that she either wasn’t getting enough attention from or who just didn’t strike her fancy just right, which he didn’t entirely mind. He didn’t know for sure, was just guessing, and whatever the two of them had going wasn’t immediately serious. The questions started striking him when they started getting more serious, when she was calling him just to talk, when he was picking her up to take her out to some little burger shop that was probably ridiculously quaint and lame to her (but was all he could really afford on a mechanic’s salary and helping so much with the bills as he was), and when he told her that he was joining the military, expecting her to give him an ‘it was nice hanging out, but see ya’ kind of reaction.
He'd been approached by military recruiters from all branches throughout his years in high school, but he'd refused them all because he didn't want to leave his mother behind. That changed about two months after graduation, when he came home from ten hours at the garage and found his mother's nose bleeding and tears streaming down her face because she'd just been pounded on, beat the hell out of the boyfriend that was currently there and ranting at him as soon as he'd walked in the door, and nearly got arrested by the time he'd thrown the guy out the door and the cops had arrived. He signed up for the Air Force the very next day without telling anyone, then talked his mother into moving to a smaller place that she could better afford on her own, crashed on the couch for awhile and marveled at the fact that Mercy hadn’t dropped him like a bad habit over the military issue. Even more surprising was that she didn’t offer up a promise to date when he got back, but that she actually started seeing him more often (and he was guessing, exclusively) after he told her. Sadly, it was just in time for him to ship off to BMT.
Much like school, Leon took to his studies and training in the military extremely well. He'd already figured out military bearing on his own and he certainly understood discipline, not to mention being in decent physical shape. What he didn't already have going in his favor, Basic Training beat into him, and he excelled there, in Tech School and then in the Survival, Evasion, Rescue and Escape (SERE) program. His job, essentially, was to be amazing at survival and then teach others to be amazing at it; it wasn't made common knowledge, but his job also extended on many occasions to going to get people who weren't amazing at survival or going into situations that most people couldn't survive, which included heavy fire in rough climates. It was extremely demanding both mentally and physically, which was what worked him into the war machine that his commanding officers required. He went home between missions, checking in with his mother and seeing Mercy every second that he could, and it was on one such trip home that his girlfriend told him the fantastic news about her career.
Dating a model seems to be every guy’s dream, and Leon was no different in that he knew she was gorgeous and completely out of his league, and he appreciated that fact, but he wasn’t so completely caught up on it as some men might be. Hearing that she was able to advance in that career path, which she’d explained to him and he understood wasn’t as easy as just trying on some clothes and letting someone take pictures, was fantastic news. The thing was that she had to move to New York to do it, and she wanted him to come along.
Thus, two 21-year olds found themselves living in the big city. Or, at least, she was living there and he was spending his leave time with her, but as he advanced in his field, he got less time overseas in a single deployment, with more regular deployments, based on the needs of the military. That meant more time with Mercy, and to visit his mother regularly enough to keep her company and to decide that he liked her new guy, then to attend her marriage to him a few years later with Mercy. His mom may or may not have dropped plenty of hints about him and Mercy during her own wedding, and may have continued to mention it afterwards, and Leon may or may not have considered it enough to have picked out a ring to go purchase after he returned from his next mission.
Regardless of his mother’s influence and his own plans, the fact of the matter is that Mercy and Leon are not married, and it’s not even the fact that her parents don’t like him much. Leon went into Africa with a small unit to rescue and return with a few American journalists who’d fallen in with some ‘bad company’ in the form of a militant group. The job was simply to go in, yank them out and get to a rendezvous point downriver that was far enough away to avoid the military having to actually take credit for the aggressive maneuver, and it wasn’t the first of its type that Leon had been involved in. If it were possible, there was even something of a routine for this kind of job, and they stuck to the plan all the way through, even when they came under heavier fire than they were expecting. Nobody got out entirely unscathed (except maybe one or two of the former captives, ironically), and Leon was no different. He was hauling a young woman along while firing one-handed back at one of their pursuers when he took a glancing shot to his thigh that forced him to actually focus on keeping his balance for the next few steps. He didn’t fall, but he shoved her forward to another member of his unit with pretty much perfect timing. He didn’t see if it was a grenade or what, but the wall beside him exploded, throwing him and a few others from the escaping group to the side and down. They couldn’t wait around for everyone to regain their bearings, so he was up and on the move along with everyone else immediately after, but his head was swimming and he could feel the hot, heavy, wet feeling that was most likely blood running down his neck from his head. The whole ordeal only lasted maybe twenty minutes before they hit the boat they had waiting and took off downriver, but those twenty minutes felt longer than the hours they spent in cover until they were more confident that they weren’t going to be instantly discovered. They camped out for the night, traveled the next day and then continued this set up until they reached the rendezvous point and could be picked up. The problem Leon had with this was that his vision turned blurry during those hours they were in hiding, and got worse while they were sleeping the first night, and just continued going downhill each day. Other members of his unit checked his eyes as they went, but it wasn’t like any of them could do anything about it until they got back to civilization. That last day, he was entirely blind.
present
Perhaps this is the best place to make the jump from Leon’s past to his present, since that was the moment that his life changed completely. He was treated and held overseas in a base hospital while they decided if he was okay to travel, which might have seemed like an odd thing to be uncertain of, considering the fact that the bullet wound had only been a flesh wound and they knew the blindness was permanent, but other than worrying that the pressure that had been caused by the head wound would continue to build and cause further damage, they wanted to make sure that he was okay mentally. When he was told the bad news, he felt something…click. It wasn’t like losing his mind, or at least, not like he would think losing his mind would be, but like something opened up despite his loss of vision, and he didn’t understand or like it. He liked it even less when he was asked how he was feeling, experienced some kind of zen moment and answered completely honestly, or when the same thing happened when he was asked for details as to what had happened. That was when he refused further questions, since that weirdness was seemingly brought on by the questioning, and that was his rule the entire time he was hospitalized; that didn’t mean everyone followed it, since questions are such a natural thing for people, but he had secrets to keep, and he wouldn’t risk someone forcing him to answer. He didn’t know if it was some drug they had him on, or some weird brain disorder from the head blow, but it was upsetting.
It got worse. He realized from the nurse in his New York hospital room asking herself a rhetorical kind of question that there was no way he could know that he was well and truly boned, since he got sudden flashes of vision, though only in his mind, of her son sitting in front of a game system, which prompted his very zenned-out response of, ‘No, he’s not doing his homework,’ and the more snarky added comment of, ‘unless modern warfare is homework.’ It was the first time he’d actually been asked something that he had no way of knowing and had the information reveal itself to him, and though she stopped and stared at him and he clammed right up, she didn’t react badly. Instead, she called her son up, heard the game paused in the background, and made it a point to ask Leon whether her son was doing his homework while she was at work each afternoon that she stopped in to check on him. He wasn’t a fan, but she also refrained from asking him anything else at his request, and helped keep others out until his mother, stepfather and finally Mercy came to see him. His mother seemed upset enough that she didn’t notice the automatic answers he gave to the few questions she asked (even though he’d requested that they don’t ask any, his mother did it automatically) and if his stepfather thought it was at all strange, he didn’t say anything about it, but Mercy noticed when they finally had some alone time and she asked how he was feeling. It didn’t take more than one question and answer for her to realize that something was up, but once again, questions are so often just a natural thing that it’s hard to expect nobody to ask you any. He went home with Mercy when the military doctors were confident that he was well enough and had taught Leon and Mercy to the best of everyone’s abilities the things that he’d need to get used to his new needs.
Getting used to not having his vision was a difficult process, especially in the beginning. The doctors had suggested a nurse that would stop in a few days a week in the first month or so just to help teach him the necessary techniques for such simple daily things as folding his money in different ways so that he could tell which bill was which, getting around with the cane he’d left the hospital with, and setting up the kitchen, bathroom and other areas of the house in ways that made sense so that he could keep doing the things he was used to. In the year since, he’s come a long way in figuring these things out, and his SERE training has certainly helped him adapt very quickly, so he’s actually about as functional as he could possibly be. That doesn’t mean he’s not still bitter about it, nor does that do anything for the situation where he answers questions like a damn fortune cookie, or the way he just ‘knows things’, but he’s working on that. He’s also working on not being a miserable bastard with Mercy, but that’s easier said than done some days, all things considered.
family
PARENTS AND SIBLINGS
Father: Otto Kilik
Mother: Ava Nolon (formerly Noel)
Stepfather: Robert Nolon
likes
+ Mercy’s Perfume. She wears a particular scent that, now that he can’t see her, he could pick out anywhere and absolutely adores. It’s familiar and sexy and home. Actually, he’s really into scents in general, especially for people he’s close to, but hers in particular stands out.
+ Smaller Spaces. Believe it or not after the thing with the closet when he was a kid, Leon likes smaller locations. It’s a lot easier to navigate them for him, and there aren’t usually as many potential dangers if he takes a wrong step, which he’s done in the past.
+ Independence. Being unable to be completely independent is really hard on him, but he really values the days that he can go out into the city and do whatever he likes without screwing up in some way. It’s like a bit of a self-confidence boost when he really needs it the most.
+ Dressing Well. In going along with his pride issues and insistence that he’s entirely capable, he likes to maintain a certain standard in grooming and dress, meaning he’s usually neat and probably more presentable than is necessary for his daily routines, but he doesn’t mind.
+ The Gym. It’s not entirely easy, and it hurts his pride a little that the gym employees are so very attentive when he’s there, but he accepts most of their help as graciously as he can. They still drive him kind of nuts, but he understands their concerns and he’s too interested in staying in shape to fight with them about it.
dislikes
+ Open Spaces. Considering his disability, being out and about in a huge, open space is completely disorienting, especially in a crowd or when there are too many sounds for him to tell which way he’s supposed to be going. It’s extremely difficult for anyone to walk an entirely straight line, and without some kind of landmarks, he could get lost easily.
+ Vulnerability. He’s used to being incredibly capable and comfortable in his own skin, and so much has changed in the past year that it’s left him with gaping holes in his emotional shields. He hates needing help, but does on a regular basis, and so he’ll be aggressively independent sometimes just to reassure himself that he can function on his own.
+ Disorganization. He’s absolutely certain that Mercy sometimes leaves things in the wrong places on purpose when she’s mad at him just to get on his nerves, and he only rarely calls her out on it, but he hates it when things are in the wrong places. Anytime they have company over, he has trouble finding things the next day, and it drives him bonkers.
+ Overly Helpful People. Leon knows that he’s disabled, thank you very much. He doesn’t need someone hovering around him and trying to do everything for him.
+ Questions. They happen about 800 times a day and he’s getting better at dealing with them without having to spit out answers every single time, but even the questions he doesn’t give into the compulsion to answer, he tends to get hit with the answer to. It’s sometimes disorienting, and it’s extremely annoying.
other notes The Magic Mirror is awake, but not obviously so. The compulsion to answer questions truthfully and the sudden visions/knowledge as to what the answer is comes from the Mirror and its abilities to know the answers to the questions it’s asked.
...literature*
book title Snow White
backstory So there’s this evil queen, right? She’s all kinds of beautiful and vain, and she has this mirror that she likes to talk to. That would be crazy, except this mirror has a spirit locked inside of it that has to answer her questions honestly. She likes to ask who the hottest lady in the land is, which goes to show how caught up with her looks she was, since she could have asked him all kinds of things that a queen ought to know. Nope, she was worried about who might be prettier than she was, and for a long time, he answered that she was the most bodacious. Then, her stepdaughter got old enough to show up on the Babedar, and that was the end of that. Cue extremely jealous and homicidal queen, and the mirror continuing to throw Snow White under the bus each time the queen decides she’s dead and leaves her alone. To be fair, it’s not his fault, but that’s still how it goes.
...roleplayer*
name Stark
age 25
gender Le Femme Fatale
rp experience Ridiculous. 13 years?
how you found ouac there were these breadcrumbs, then a red pill, and somehow I'm here.
rp sample It had already been two weeks in his new position, and Jamie had to admit, working for Maggie Sinclaire wasn't boring. He was busy constantly, sometimes to the point of insanity, and there was no end to the expectations she made it clear that she had. He could understand how some of her previous personal assistants had trouble, because he'd known even when they were employed that they didn't know jack shit about restaurants. The problem was that neither did Maggie, and she really didn't care about how it was run, so long as a standard was maintained. 100% on health inspections (which some of the previous assistants had failed to provide), fantastic food and service, punctual employees, the whole nine. There were to be no problems, and if there was a problem, it was to be fixed completely and immediately. Jamie really had no time to become acquainted with the job, mostly because Maggie just didn't care how he figured out how to do his job, as long as he did, but the first day was rough. He legitimately went home thinking that there wasn't a chance he was going to manage it, and was pretty upset with the whole ordeal, then went back the next day and got his shit together. That was it for his acclimation period.
In the two weeks since, he'd figured out the making of the various schedules (dining room, bar and kitchen, all of which it became clear had been the responsibility of the personal assistants before him and which was still a bitch, usually done at home somewhere in the midst of his homework, which he never seemed to have the time to do), the requirements for a perfect health inspection and generally all of the things he hadn't already known. He'd stayed later than he was required a few nights with the chef to learn how to jump behind the line if it was necessary to help them during a push, he'd already known bar well enough to help, and having been a server, he was all kinds of on that, all of which were advantages over his predecessors. It wasn't easy, it was a lot of hours that Maggie hadn't even required to get it together, but he had a decent system finally, and he was all about keeping it that way. None of the employees really wanted to approach Maggie on anything, so he got the AWESOME (read the sarcasm there, please) job of playing middle man, listening to everyone's problems and then translating them into something Maggie understood and might respond to (she didn't care about a lot of things, including feelings, which was why he did better talking to people), and then when Maggie found some reason to hate an employee, he got to try to save the person's job, or see if they legitimately deserved to be fired. He had a pretty good track record so far, and two of the people Maggie had picked out as being 'ugly' or 'stupid' had also been doing something shady and been promptly fired. Jamie didn't even try to help them, simply stressed that they shouldn't ask for unemployment and that the restaurant should be filing charges (in the case of the dishwasher who'd been helping himself to the freezer). He'd saved the jobs for the others, all except those two, and he tried to keep other problems out of Maggie's line of sight so that he could deal with them instead.
So far, it was working pretty well, and was actually what he was up to for about an hour before Maggie arrived, which made him glad that she was late. Personally, he didn't give a shit because he had a million and a half things to do without her giving him more, so he was just fine being busy without her there, but this talk was better had without her presence.
Ashleigh, a pretty blonde girl who sometimes came across as being kind of ditzy, was actually a little smarter than she looked. Jamie probably wouldn't have noticed if not for his fantastic hearing, but she'd agreed to a 'business venture' with an older male customer that had prompted a larger than usual tip as a promise and included a time and hotel room number the night before. Jamie left it to her, and the girl had ironed her clothes before coming in that morning, but she'd gotten home too late to wash them; he remembered her mentioning that she didn't have laundry machines, and so she went to the laundromat after work some nights, and last night was obviously not one of them, because she smelled of the older gentleman's cologne when she walked by him into his office for a chat. Even then, she might have gotten away with just a warning not to ever do something like that out of Bleeding Hearts again, if she hadn't run her mouth.
"Did that bitch accuse me of this? I bet she did, she's always jealous of girls who are prettier than she is," the girl said, and Jamie couldn't disagree that Maggie had a habit of not keeping anyone who might be a threat to her crown as the most beautiful in the building, but considering Maggie's lack of involvement, not cool.
"Actually, she had nothing to do with it, Ashleigh. She may be a bitch, but she hasn't said anything to me about you. I saw and heard it, and I'm the one telling you that you can't do it," he informed her sharply, having already heard plenty of anti-Maggie sentiment out of her already since they started talking, and while he couldn't blame her entirely, that wasn't the problem here and drawing attention away from her mistake by bitching about Maggie wasn't getting them anywhere.
"She is a bitch. I bet she's never had to work a day in her life, the spoiled brat," Ashleigh grumbled, but she looked more petulant than legitimately pissed off at this point.
"Maybe she had a rough upbringing. The point here is not Magg--"
"God, I hope so. I hope her parents beat her," the server interjected, and Jamie's jaw snapped shut, eyes narrowing.
When Maggie Sinclaire walked in, a whirlwind of red, part of which landed on his desk and papers in a red-furred heap that he gently moved aside with only a short hesitation to absorb the fact that she really HAD just done that to him, he was working on filling in Ashleigh's shifts on the current schedule, and shifted just slightly to write down Maggie's instructions when she started spitting them out. He'd learned to wait until she was finished to start doing anything, since she had a habit of giving a whole list all at once, and other than a simple, "It's Michael, Miss Sinclaire," when she called him 'Simon', he didn't respond with anything more than a nod and his attention as she spoke. The only reason he even said anything about the name was because she never seemed to call him the same name for long, and it was never his own. Simon wasn't actually terrible as far as names went, but if she legitimately didn't know his name, he didn't mind screwing with her, and if she did, then she was being a bitch about it, so he also didn't mind. He also only did it every few days, so she wouldn't get pissy, if she even noticed. He wondered sometimes.
At the mention of the little blonde he was supposed to fire, he hesitated and almost missed the coffee and tart order, flicking his eyes back up from his pen and quirking an eyebrow up at her. He knew which blonde she was talking about, it being Ashleigh getting her things together and leaving, but he was surprised by the mention of firing her, and the reason just being people thinking she was dumb. Huh. "I fired her about ten minutes ago, Miss Sinclaire. She should be on her way out the door as we speak," he informed his boss, only feeling slightly bad about having changed his mind about whether or not he was letting her stay over her asshole comment, but he wasn't going to help someone at risk to himself when they were ignorant assholes who deserved to be fired to begin with.
He was actually in the process of getting up to get her coffee, then make the calls she'd said to, when she looked up and narrowed her eyes, which should have meant trouble. What left her mouth was the LAST thing he expected. Her breasts?
THAT broke his regular concentration. He stared at her a moment, blinking in a manner that was really just shocked and hopefully wouldn't be seen as being dumb to her, and automatically glanced to the breasts in question. Bad move, that was his boss. His eyes flicked back up to her face, then back down, then up. "Um, they're..." again with the chest to eyes to chest to eyes dance, though he had SOME willpower and ended up on her eyes again for a pretty appropriate, flattering, but still fairly true statement (he wouldn't call ANY breasts perfect, but he wasn't a huge fan of massive ones, so she was probably about as close to perfect on that scale as his opinion got). "They're perfect, like always, but I don't know if it's okay for us to discuss that?"
Yeah, because talking (and looking) about your boss' breasts with her was appropriate. What the fuck.
