il_promenade application

[consultmybooks]

PLAYER

✧ NAME: Hickumu
✧ LJ USERNAME: hickumu
✧ CONTACT (EMAIL, AIM, MSN, PLURK, ETC.): AIM – Lucied81292. A PM to this roleplaying journal is way more likely to get a response, though - I'm way slower getting to PMs on my personal journal.
✧ CURRENT MUSE LIST: None at this game

CHARACTER

✧ NAME: Rupert Giles
✧ SERIES: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
✧ HISTORY: http://buffy.wikia.com/wiki/Rupert_Giles
✧ TIMELINE: Season Eight, after his death in "Last Gleaming, Part Four”
✧ PERSONALITY:

Giles is a basically methodical, patient person. If he doesn’t know the answer to something, he trusts that the answer can be found with enough work, enough research, and the right book. And Giles likes knowing the answer – it’s practically a need when confronted with a problem. He’s a logical thinker, although his sense of logic is a bit skewered by his years in Sunnydale. He knows enough by now not to depend too much on plans. A part of him honestly enjoys research, unless the fate of the world is actively at stake.

When dealing with people he doesn’t know very well, Giles tends to be rather reserved. He’ll be polite, unless provoked otherwise, but his job as Watcher and his position in Sunnydale didn’t lend itself well to getting to know people. He could almost be called shy and he still is, to some degree, although the word “reticent” might be more applicable. Sunnydale may have been destroyed, but Giles’ current mission means that he’s still had plenty of cause to be guarded in his speech over the last several months. If the person he’s talking to happens to be aware of the existence of supernatural elements, however, Giles usually finds it easier to talk to them. He considers the supernatural and the magical a point of conversation as much as the weather.

Giles prefers having a job to do and a part to play that lets him be helpful to Buffy and the others, and helpful to the Slayer organization in general. He deeply dislikes feeling useless. It depresses him, and occasionally makes him act downright erratically or foolishly in an attempt to fix things. Since being quietly exiled from the Slayer community, a few of his old bad habits in that regard have returned. Faith’s presence balances him somewhat, but only somewhat.

Much of Giles’ worldview and the way he thinks has been shaped by his past. He hates who he was when he was younger. He strives to be as different from “Ripper” as he possibly can, and generally reacts very badly to reminders of his past – interestingly enough, his time in Sunnydale is sometimes relegated to the role of “his past” right alongside his time with his gang, depending on the subject in question (such as, for example, what happened between him and Jenny). His reluctance to depend on or even use magic was likely born from the disaster with Eyghon the Sleepwalker that resulted in the death of one of his friends. His generally repressed, uptight, sometimes even stuffy nature is the exact opposite of the person he used to be, although the Scooby gang has successfully mellowed him out into something like a happy medium over the years, and his travels with Faith have only continued this trend.

Even so, despite his attempts to distance himself from his past, Giles still has a very real dark side. He has a capacity for sadism, cruelty, and hate not really found in any of the other Scoobies. Much as he tries to keep a leash on these darker impulses, they are still there. If people he cares for are in danger or hurt, there’s very little Giles won’t do to protect them. He can hold a grudge, and he’s not above getting revenge against his enemies or even killing them. He “does not like showing that side” of himself to his friends, although he hesitates a good deal less now than he used to, if the situation calls for some of his old nature.

He has a sense of humor, although it’s impossibly dry and usually goes over his friends’ heads. His occasional tendency to banter with Faith, however, possibly shows that even his sense of humor has evolved to some small degree since Sunnydale’s destruction. He even has a mischievous, subversive streak, although it only ever really showed itself around Wesley.

Giles’ multiple bad experiences with the Watcher’s Council, and Buffy’s refusal to submit to them, have given him new respect for Buffy’s willingness to rebel against unworthy authority. Even if it happens to be his. His encounter with the remnants of the Council in Germany have left him with the very definite sense that the entire Watcher organization deserves to be wiped out. While Andrew and Dawn are very carefully excluded from this, Giles thinks of them as what Watchers should evolve to be, and he himself is no longer certain where he stands with regards to his old title.

Despite being mellowed out, Giles is still an old fashioned sort of person. Most contemporary pop culture references, up to and including things as basic as Superman, will go completely over his head. Giles is also technologically illiterate. He hates computers on general principle, and computers generally seem to hate him right back. He can operate a phone, a calculator, a cash register (possibly), walkie-talkies, and household appliances, but nothing much more complicated. He stopped wearing as much tweed as a concession to the hot California weather more than anything else, and he still wore suits sometimes when working at the Magic Box. However, now that Sunnydale is gone, Giles seems to have adopted a style that prefers comfort above all else. He prefers records to CDs, was ashamed to admit to owning a television, and considers Bay City Rollers to be “what music is all about” no matter how much Buffy makes fun of him for it.

Giles values his space, and his privacy. He doesn’t like talking about himself, or his past. However, he has shared important bits and pieces when the situation calls for it, especially with Buffy. He’s not a generally sociable person, although he can get by. Working at the Magic Box was good for helping him adjust to dealing with multiple people at once, as has his time scouring the globe for news of Twilight – he had to communicate with people. Giles does value adult company, as much as he likes the rest of the Scooby Gang. Once upon a time, he was a bit of a romantic, at heart. However, the spectacular and tragic failure of his last two romantic endeavors, along with bearing witness to the continuous romantic troubles of his friends, have soured him over the years.

Bearing witness to the various emotional trials and tribulations of the Scooby gang frustrates Giles at times, but he honestly hates seeing his friends upset and will offer his advice, if he has any to offer. He will certainly walk away if he feels that is best or at least better for the person in question than staying, or if they honestly want him gone rather than his help, but Giles prefers to be close to his friends. He’s gotten used to being the resident adult of the Scooby gang, and to all the various and sundry problems that come with that role. Even now that the Scoobies are all adults themselves, it’s not a role he’s been able to easily shake. He’s very protective of his friends, especially Buffy, and is not afraid to take extreme measures to keep them safe. He will not, however, always let them in on this fact – if they can be kept safe and happy by being kept ignorant of his plans to keep them safe, then Giles will keep them ignorant. If the situation is bad enough and Giles has a plan, it can take a lot of arguing to dissuade him from it.

✧ ABILITIES/POWERS:

Giles is in exceptional physical condition for a man his age, and really for humans in general. He has spent several decades, probably about forty years, training himself to survive against the various mystic, supernatural, and mundane horrors that dogged his life from the beginning. This has left Giles with agility, physical strength, and stamina well above human average. Giles’ stamina and ability to soak up physical punishment is especially noticeable, and largely due to his years training with and against the Slayer, as well as the marked fondness of the various nasties of Sunnydale to use him as bait against Buffy. This former Watcher can take a great deal of damage before going down, unless a sharp blow to the head is involved – Giles has been knocked unconscious over twenty times over the course of his canon by various means.

Giles is familiar with most medieval weaponry, such as swords, axes, knives, and bows. He has also demonstrated a familiarity with firearms uncommon to most of the Scoobies – Giles has proven able to operate complex rifles and shotguns, including the elephant gun frequently used to subdue the werewolf Oz and Chinese assault rifles.

While Giles has no capacity for sorcery on his own, he has an extensive knowledge of all things mystical, at least within the boundaries of his own world. This knowledge includes knowledge of the workings of black magic that one might not otherwise expect him to possess. This knowledge has, in the past, allowed him to “cheat”, in a way, and perform feats of magic someone without his background or experience would not be able to achieve. In many ways, Giles is a more accomplished magic user than any witch with more power and less experience.

Giles also has several other abilities beyond those used to battle for his life against the forces of darkness. He is an accomplished acoustic guitar player, a decent cook, and has extensive knowledge of outdoor living and survival.

✧ TIME OF ARRIVAL: Night
✧ MASK DESIGN: A basic half-mask effectively covering the top half of his face. The front of the mask is covered in a smooth mirror finish.
✧ PLACE OF SOLACE: Buffy’s old house in Sunndale

SAMPLES

✧ FIRST PERSON: ~150+ words
Rules are meant to be bent and broken to suit convenience.

It sound callous and wrong, but…Buffy taught me that. And it’s a mindset that’s worked out well enough for the both of us, over the years.

But this city, this place…it’s different from Sunnydale. Nazi Germany parallels could probably b drawn, although at the very least they’re a bit nicer about it. But Nazi Germany, all the less. Not wearing your designated brand when you go out into the world is punishable by imprisonment and some…truly unpleasant experiments.

Why yes, I am speaking from experience, in case you’re wondering. To be fair, I nearly made it to sunset out in the city without my mask before the scientists caught up with me. I must say, I…try not to think about what happened next. I’m not sure I can entirely remember what happened next, actually. I know I put up a good fight. I always do.

Suffice to say, it’s made me a bit more cautious about breaking the rules of this place.

And it’s made me hate this stupid mask so much more. There are days when I feel as though I’m living for the moment where I can shove it in a wood chipper. Not being able to speak is a little more tolerable, at the very least. It’s not as though I haven’t had practice with that particular rule.

✧ THIRD PERSON:
This wasn’t the rabbit hole, and he certainly wasn’t Alice.

That did stop Giles from drawing parallels.

He knew the rules of this place. He didn’t understand them, but he knew them. Obey the Queen when the sun shone. Obey the King when the moon rose. Beware them both, look out for the Exile. It was like being a Watcher again, at the whims of the Council, and yet even more controlling and ridiculous. But this was a dream, or so everyone kept telling him, and Giles had never had the most sensible subconscious.

But then, of course, you had the matter of the mirror.

Giles found himself watching the mirror a great deal, watching himself moving through his last moments from the other side of the glass. He’d smashed it on multiple occasions – once because he’d actually thought it might do something, once because…well, the sound of shattering glass had proven to be quite cathartic, and provided some relief from the images. He tried keeping a sheet over it, but that never lasted long. It would slip, or he’d get tired of looking at the sheet, at the hopeless, helpless denial he was displaying, and surrender to the inevitable by pulling it down.

He knew he was driving himself mad watching himself die over and over again – the mirror was only playing about ten minutes back from the point of his death, so at best it was hopelessly repetitive. But there was one upside to it. Watching his death over and over again made the entire scene…meaningless. After a while, he’d felt himself growing numb to the horror of it.

They said that you were brought here through your dreams. What did that make him? He’d watched the mirror enough to know that he was most certainly dead, but…the state of Sunnydale at the time of his death had been the epitome of unpredictability. Who knew what it could have affected? Who knew what his death might have caused or meant?

Even so, for all the strange rules and strange happenings and strange people, life in this city was life. That was something he couldn’t have anymore, back home.

Giles only realized that the room was growing lighter when he felt the warmth of sunlight on his face. He glanced to his right, and gazed out the window that displayed the vast city of dreams.

The sun was only just rising.

Giles watched it for a while longer, watched until there was no denying that morning was well and truly here. Then, and only then, did he slip the mirrored mask over his face.

Long live the Queen.