Post by Feliks Łukasiewicz on May 23, 2013 18:23:53 GMT -8
| Feliks Tadeusz Łukasiewicz A genius who would never be taken for a genius, Feliks is a girlish, resilient young man who acts as hairdresser by day, a pony breeder by evening, and a secret agent by night. He is personable, if annoying to a lot of people, and excellent at keeping secrets. Of course, he deliberately makes himself seem to be less intelligent than he really is. It's amazing how much people will underestimate you that way. |
| CODE NAME: Bunny-Ears |
| Male | 24 | Presumed gay |
| Polish | Operative | Agent |
| Physical |
| 170 cm | 54 kg | Blond hair to shoulder |
| Green eyes | Light-skinned | Slim |
| Personal |
Upon meeting Feliks for the first time, most people assume that he is a high-school girl, a brainless idiot, or a brainless, idiotic teenage girl. This is deliberate on his part. In reality, Feliks is a lot more intelligent than he lets on--more intelligent to the degree that his hobbies include codebreaking, and even codemaking when he's really bored. Sometimes, for fun, he communicates with a few select friends through coded messages hidden in posts on My Little Pony forums, which are always signed "Rarity." The coded messages, once deciphered, often turn out to be in Polish or Latin, depending on whom the message is for. However, not every post he makes contains these messages; sometimes, all they mean is what they appear to mean. Many other members of such forums admire him for owning, breeding, and training a small number of ponies in real life. He has also been known to play with gadgets and doodads and invent things once in a while. When he gets the chance and some materials, he happily produces all kinds of things--some more immediately useful than others. These are just a few of many things he does simply because he likes exercising his mind; others include reading literature from all over the world, playing with the mathematics that go into everyday life (for instance, he knows, thanks to a couple hours of boredom and a few quick Internet searches for measurements, exactly how much weight every major bridge in London can hold assuming they are all properly maintained), and predicting the phenotypes of the foals his ponies might produce. The intelligence that lets him do all this is hidden because Feliks has quite a stubborn and proud nature that leaves him hating to be ordered around. He deals with this by constructing a facade that will let his intellect go unmolested and undiverted to things he has no interest in, and (with this and other strong aversions) sometimes putting on a false personality that allows him to dissociate himself from his situation. "Fake Feliks" is selfish and airheaded, easily manipulable and completely unaware of basic facts of life, and would never think of, say, slipping that secret message containing incredibly valuable information to the friendly agent who is pretending to explain something to him because he is clearly too dense to understand the obvious things being explained... The real Feliks can be self-serving at times, though not nearly to the extent that he makes himself appear to be. This is partly an artifact of how much time he spends inside his own head, since his thoughts are often very difficult to share. He does not always realize when he is being offensive, because people often react to his innocent behavior as if it were and he has had to lose sensitivity to such reactions in order to get by in life. As for the cross-dressing part? While he's aware that people tend to estimate fashionable young women's intelligence as fairly low, the primary reason that he dresses as one is just that he enjoys it. His preference for dressing like a girl sometimes puts him at odds with his religious authorities. He is a devout Catholic, but his nature and intelligence is of a kind that means he does not always accept everything he hears--particularly when his nature is the subject of debate, as he has come to the conclusion that by now he is indeed aware of what is going on inside his own head. His religion still matters to him enough that he continues to attend Mass regularly despite the rather enormous demands on his time inherent to holding three jobs. |
| Likes | Dislikes |
Mathematics, particularly when they are actually useful. He has a talent for numbers, but quickly gets bored if they aren't doing anything he cares about. Codebreaking is a particular favorite application. Ponies! He has a childish (some might say "girlish") love for all things equine, and a particular fondness for the small variety. Especially if they have ribbons braided into their manes. Speaking multiple languages. He can switch between English and Polish at the drop of a hat (having been raised bilingual) and delights in using whichever one someone he dislikes will have a harder time understanding. He also likes to hear himself talk, partly because he thinks rather highly of himself and partly because he is fascinated by how different his own voice sounds in different languages. Because of this, he's picked up a few other languages along the way, and knows how to sound like a brainless teenage girl in all of them. Swishy skirts. He likes the way it looks and feels, and it doesn't hurt that people tend to treat him differently when he dresses like a girl. Watching their varying reactions interests him. Confusing people, as might be clear from the rest of this list. People fascinate him, and he is so different from most of them that he has become accustomed to seeing the whole range of human emotions just in reaction to his actions. He also has a bit of a devious streak that can make all this more pronounced. Reading anything and everything that comes his way. It serves him as a steady diet of new information to occupy his mind with. | Being treated like a lackey. He hates having his talents demanded from him, which is part of why he behaves in such a way as to persuade people that he doesn't have them. The British food known as "bangers and mash." Don't ask him why if you value your life; the story is a sensitive point with him. Clashing colors, especially on clothing. Why would anyone wear things that don't look good? Boredom. He is easily bored if nothing is happening or if he isn't involved in anything, which is another big reason why he acts so oddly. He is forever looking for something to entertain himself with. "Dumb Pole" jokes whenever they cycle back around into fashion. Even if he makes himself out to be less than brilliant, he resents that his ditzy behavior is treated as representative of his family and the entire country they're from, particularly since his real intelligence is much closer to the typical case among Polish people. Bullies of all stripes. After being bullied for a long time, it's nearly impossible to avoid either hating bullies or becoming one yourself. Though he's thoughtless sometimes, Feliks is not a fan of people coming to actual harm, and he particularly hates bullies who still think it's okay to pick on him. |
| Dreams | Fears |
Saving the world. Why else would he have gone along with becoming a secret agent, if not on account of having grandiose dreams of the good he could do with such a position? He's aware that it's asking an awful lot--but still, a guy can dream, can't he? Maybe the next mission will be to take down some villainous plot to destroy everything that is just and good in the universe. Finding someone to love. This is also a really tall order for a spy, but that never stopped him before. He's very conscientious about not putting himself or whomever he might fall for in danger--but, drat it all, he gets lonely. One of his ponies winning an award. What? Sure, it's only a cover job, but it's a cover job he loves. Of course he wants to excel in that too. | Being alone. He gets very lonely when he has no one to talk to, and sincerely believes that he will go insane if he loses everyone he cares about. Confinement. The idea that he could be trapped and unable to protect himself or get free utterly terrifies him, though if he ever found himself in that situation he would probably able to keep the panic down enough to find any possible way out. Weakness, or more specifically being put into situations where his physical weakness can be exploited. His strengths are almost exclusively mental, and his small, thin physique does nothing to alleviate his lack of arm strength. It's not that he's in bad shape, he just lacks muscle, and he knows that if he gets in the wrong place that could be very dangerous indeed. Forgetting about something that matters. He treasures his knowledge and his relationships with others, and fears losing his memories of them. Even the bad experiences he has had, though in one way it would be a relief to be free of them, are important: if he forgot about those, wouldn't that mean that he wouldn't know it if something of the sort was about to happen again? Spiders. He's perfectly aware that they are useful to humans, that they get rid of icky flies, et cetera... but that doesn't stop them from being creepy. And some of them can kill you. |
| Background |
The son of Polish immigrants, Feliks was noticeably different from other kids starting at a very young age. When he was a toddler, his best friend was his next-door neighbor, a girl about a year older than himself, to whom he gravitated for reasons inexplicable to his parents. Like every child in that neighborhood, male and female, he attended plenty of tea parties in pretty dresses; the unusual thing was that, unlike the other little boys, he never reached a point where he grew bored with it and gave it up. The tea parties started to become less and less frequent when he was about six or seven, but his friends kept loaning him skirts until he was old enough to buy his own. Equally unusual, at least in the eyes of his school, was his academic talent. Many things came easily to him once he discovered that there was a purpose to the boring parts--he resisted maths and letters at first, until he was dragged past the early stages and found that in the harder stages these things meant something with which he could entertain himself. He did have a bit of trouble with certain aspects of Western European history, because like many students he could never tell the difference between Charles, Charles II, Charles II, Charles V, and Charles V or between Louis, Louis, Louis, Louis, Louis, Louis, Louis, and Clovis, though he found the history of Eastern Europe significantly easier to understand. The names were easier to remember, and seemed far less foreign to him than to his natively English classmates. It is an unfortunate fact of life that any child who is particularly unusual amongst his classmates will necessarily be subject to a certain degree of bullying which is greater than the degree typically experienced in that group. Feliks would have very much liked to be the exception to the rule, but sadly he was not. He was the subject of a great deal of bullying starting very early, even before he grew his hair out and began wearing skirts to school, over his unpronounceable last name and his perceived "know-it-all" status. Between that and the way the teachers talked to him, Feliks began to disguise his talents in the hopes that people would leave him alone. The bullying never really abated, but it changed tenor to something that didn't bother him quite as much, and that was almost good enough. When Feliks was about twelve, he finally had sufficient control over his own appearance to grow out his hair to the shoulder-length style he has maintained ever since, and to begin occasionally showing up to school in a girls' uniform. The bullying that redoubled at that point still occasionally gives him nightmares, though he is past every other artifact of his awkward preteen phase. This was when the infamous "bangers and mash" incident occurred, which still makes him angry to think of, and he has never since touched the dish. Even the smell of it makes him sick to his stomach now. We shall not speak of what happened to him in high school, but it includes the reason his fear of his own weakness is so vivid. This is not to say that he did not have friends in school; his neighbors and one or two others had largely just accepted that he was odd and stuck up for him when they could, and if his parents did not precisely approve of some of his clothes they made no effort to stop him from dressing like a girl once he made it clear that he was determined to do it at least some of the time. University treated Feliks considerably better, aside from the reactions to his now-habitual ditzy facade that generally amounted to, "what's (s)he even doing here?" When he graduated on time, the general belief held that he had probably either cheated or paid someone off to get the diploma, but that was all right. He knew, and those responsible for ensuring he had done so knew, that he had earned his way. However, before he graduated, Feliks had taken up certain unusual pastimes. He had started his enjoyable nights as an amateur cryptographer during high school, and had used it to communicate with the few friends he had in the middle of class without anyone noticing, but it was during university that he had taken his hobby to more ambitious heights: developing stranger codes and sneaking them into increasingly public places. His talents had caught the notice of someone at MI6, and once he graduated they offered him a job. Feliks was a little dubious about his ability to perform the vaunted action-y side of spy duties, and he still is, but after some substantial consideration he accepted. Every single day of his training with MI6, he showed up wearing a fluffy pink bunny-ear headband with whatever else he felt appropriate for the day. He justified this because nobody who saw a spy in pink bunny ears would ever remember anything else about him. He does not usually wear the ears anymore, but occasionally he will pull them out just because he can. During said training, he was advised to get a civilian job as his cover. He picked two: he now works as a stylist at a beauty salon and moonlights as a small-time pony breeder. He has been seen dating men occasionally, but he likes to keep his romantic life rather private and as such little is known about it. |
| Role-Play Sample |
(From Manor of Fate, because I didn't like any of my TND posts this much.) Such a strange place, this manor. It was bigger than Feliks had expected, reminding him of the High Middle Ages more than anything--like a relic of a time much older than America. A plantation in the American South from before their war wiped out slavery was so very reminiscent of a fief in Europe from before anyone other than the odd Viking knew America existed, as if history had copied itself over. Or, he allowed practically, as if this were a common sign of a powerful ruling class that wanted to have all possible control over its lessers. The similarities he noted mostly ran along the lines of how almost everything one could need to live existed in this place, except for freedom. It was the perfect setup to deny freedom to others. One could eat here from the gardens and livestock they would have kept, and never needed to leave to buy more food. The raw materials for clothing were grown on plantations like these; if they had wanted to, the masters of this place might have kept some back so that the enslaved seamsters they surely had could outfit everyone who lived there. Water and shelter were equally served by such a place, and a degree of safety was offered by the same boundaries that were also meant to keep the slaves to afraid to run away. There was even a chapel, which was where he had wandered his way to now. The chapel was in ruins, which somehow seemed totally appropriate. From the outside, Feliks could see that the windows were broken and the walls were a dirty, sooty mess. He shook his head in half-pretended sorrow, having no attachment to this place but remembering all the times when war had meant he had to worship in a familiar church reduced to a similar state. The door was burnt to the point where only half of it still existed, and it wobbled crazily on its hinges as Feliks pushed it open before himself. The inside still smelled of smoke and the floor was coated with ash, though every other sign indicated that the chapel had burned a long time before. Keeping the skirt of his nun* costume high enough off the ground that he would not get it dirtier than necessary, he walked deeper into the desecrated sanctuary, between the charred skeletons of pews. When had the chapel burned, and why? It had obviously never been cleaned or attended to since, so it must have been near or after the time when the manor was abandoned, because if there had been people living there then surely they would have at least gone and swept up some of the ashes. Instead, it seemed to have been left the way it was for however many years it had been. Perhaps it was even a recent development--there was an awful lot of ash left, and it seemed surprisingly unmixed with dirt or dust or plant life--but that seemed unlikely in light of his other question: what might have started the fire? It didn't make sense that lightning would strike a small stone building in the courtyard of a much larger building that had evidently gone untouched. Any fire from outside would have left marks elsewhere. That meant the fire must have started within the chapel--perhaps from an accident involving ceremonial candles, or possibly some arsonist having fun? Feliks reached the front of the sanctuary, before what was left of the altar, and looked up at the crucifix. Transferring the gathered folds of his skirt to his left hand, he crossed himself and bowed his head to pray silently. That is, he had intended to pray silently. Within a few moments, he was whispering his prayer under his breath: "Kyrie eleison, Lord have mercy," switching from liturgical language to everyday tongue and back. A thought burst in his head, marking an unsettling counterpoint to his prayer: this place, which was set up perfectly to deny freedom to the enslaved, was also set up perfectly to deny escape to the nations now. *That would be Japan's idea of what a Catholic nun would look like, which bears very little resemblance to the real thing. |
| OOC Information |
| Koko |
| Chatango names: WhatsAKosovo and BunnyEarsPoland |
| A man visits his doctor with celery stalks stuck in each ear and a carrot stick up each nostril. He mumbles, "Doc, I'm just not feeling well." The doctor replies, "Maybe you're not eating right." |
| "If I could rearrange the alphabet, I'd put 'U' and 'I' together." |
| made by CAPTAIN of BACK TO NEVERLAND |
