Borders Application
Apr. 24th, 2014 10:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
notafatfoxOOC Info:
Your Name: Siobhan
Your Age: 26
Contact: plurk: fiercebadrabbit, AIM: blitztsunami
Journal Name:notafatfox
IC Info:
Name: Lal Banerjee
Age/Apparent Age: 28
Species: Werecreature
Type: Dhole
Magic Type: N/A
Powers: Lal has an enhanced sense of smell and sight and unusual strength and agility even as a human. He can turn into a stupid looking fat fox and a scary monster that vaguely resembles a stupid looking fat fox. His change is three days into the waxing moon. He has an affinity to and many personality traits of a dhole, but as he’s on the wrong continent to encounter any, this is mostly just a pain.
Special Abilities: Lal is aggressively efficient, unusual as that is for a bureaucrat. Whatever needs doing, as long as it’s a normal thing that normal people do, will get done double quick and be meticulously correct. He’s a rather mathematical thinker and his idea of logic can be a bit cold, but most people don’t quibble with results. He’s a competent percussionist (bass drum back in high school marching band, and he has a small collection of drums now), a pretty decent cook, and he has a knack for dissecting novels at entirely too much length. He speaks English, Hindi, and some Urdu.
Description: In his ordinary human form, Lal is fairly unremarkable. He’s on the short side of medium and, while surprisingly fit for a cubical dweller (like it or not he gets quite a workout around his moon), he generally dresses to hide it in shapeless polo shirts and khaki. His skin is deeply bronze with a reddish cast and he has a strong-featured, long face with especially expressive eyebrows. He wears his dark hair long, usually trying to coax it to be straight (though the slightest humidity makes it sproing back up into curls). He veers in and out of facial hair, usually sticking with a mustache and goatee when he’s in the mood to shave less. Lal has a ready smile that tends to look fake even when he means it and a general air of frenzied discombobulation that manifests in twitchy, closed body language that can abruptly snap into easy grace and speed when emergency arises. He tries not to use his lycanthropic edge.
As a dhole, he is a small canid with fluffy red fur, long legs, and a very poofy tail. It’s pretty adorable, though less so with his mouth open. It's not only full of very pointy teeth, as one would expect, but can gape unnervingly wide. He is very tired of explaining that he is, in fact, not a fat fox.
In his hybrid form, he is a snarling, monstrous, humanoid carnivore that should not be. He is still red and fluffy.
Personality: Lal is a hard person to interact with outside the strict framework of his job. He’s perfectly content when he’s answering questions about how to file business license paperwork or making reports to the home office, and if he’s occasionally a little awkward and makes bad jokes, he’s a good communicator. Run into him in the bar after work, however, and he’s much more easily thrown. He’s not good at small talk, veering from subject to subject with ill-judged babble about pet projects most of the time, and seems rather erratically interested and withdrawn from groups. If he wasn’t so good at his job, it’s unlikely anyone would want him around.
He was always a little socially unsure, but the odd contradiction isn’t really Lal’s fault. He’s a natural invert, and left to himself would sit at home watching documentaries and making cookies most of the time, but the dhole side of his nature won’t let him. Dholes are extremely social and live in massive packs, and too much time on his own makes him uncomfortable. His whole head is similarly divided. He’s a sedentary, gentle soul, and the dhole needs to run and fight. He’s a fussy vegetarian with a sweet tooth who can’t help wolfing pork chops for dinner around his moon shift and has an unfortunate chocolate allergy since the shift. It is, overall, a stressful disaster in Lal’s head, and it’s no wonder he throws himself into work all he can and spends unavoidable off hours being a discontented weirdo.
His bitterness about the change was enough to drive him away from his home and family entirely--he calls once a year on his mother’s birthday--but Lal was always a bit of a mess, unsure of himself or what he wanted, no strong identity or self-esteem. Being an unwilling were-dhole is just what he blames it on, regardless of whether it makes any sense. When he couldn’t stand the tedium of business school and switched to a hard-math version of accounting and added an English minor to keep himself sane, for instance, he defended himself to himself and anyone who’d listen for months afterward, convinced that this mild upending of his own expectations and the artificial social divide between words and numbers was a moral lapse that needed constant reframing and reinforcement. He is, in short, obnoxiously insecure, and has never been able to find anything to wrap his identity around since he rejected the family tradition. Running away was the only backbone he ever displayed in his life and it didn’t work out too well for him.
As annoying as he is, Lal basically means well. He likes people in a theoretical way, and the dhole makes him seek out people to stand next to, at the very least. He works for the government and makes sure, as such, to be a quiet and wishy-washy moderate on any issues with a political slant in there somewhere (and casting a cautiously wide net, that comes to just about all subjects), but while he’s never been involved in any kind of great good or broader movement, he makes an effort to be nice. He doesn’t mind fay and is even actively fond of dragons (though a lot of that comes down to being defiant to family tradition), sends checks to the kind of charities that feed hungry children and no one could object to, and even did a monthly afternoon at a soup kitchen before Peridexion.
The one group that Lal can’t stand is fellow werecreatures. Even knowing intellectually that most of them didn’t choose it, their mere presence makes him leery and moody. He blames this on the dhole’s hostility, but it’s really entirely him. It’s not a mean bone in his body so much as a frosty, sullen one, but it would certainly interfere with his somewhat fragile self-image as a nice, normal person with a problem if he didn’t have his monster side to blame it on.
History: Lal had a fairly normal childhood aside from having to lock his parents and, later, older sister and brother in a special room in the basement every new moon, something he assumed was normal until he started kindergarten and wound up having a few awkward conversations with a counselor before the school worked out what was going on. Perhaps it was that early indignity of having to be pulled out of class repeatedly that first set him down the road to questioning the party line.
Lal’s family had kept the werecreature line going for a half-dozen generations, considering it a blessing with a few untoward side effects and revering the fay who’d originally laid the spell on an ancestor who thrived on the magical benefits and freedom and managed to pass it on to the rest of the family. The family stayed firmly on the fay side of any magical disputes and passed the magic down generations. Lal couldn’t have been the first one to object, but he was certainly given the impression that he was. His parents were especially zealous about it, as were his mother’s two sisters and cousin who had also emigrated. It seemed very easy to lose the thread of tradition away from the family and in a new country where everything belonging to history was under threat. If they’d even given Lal time to think things through and grow out of a teenaged need to fit in and be normal, he might have come around to seeing the benefits of being able to turn into a cute but deadly predator. As it was, though he submitted to the bite when he was fifteen (after faking sick for a few days and wearing out his parents’ patience, leaving his moon change a little later than the rest of the family’s), he resented it thereafter and did everything he could to get out of the house and away.
He’d always been a good student, and he planned on going what he saw as the practical business school route. Lal managed to get enough scholarships and loans for the University of Pennsyvania without needing any help from his parents. He could have used it, certainly, and his first few years of college consisted of eating microwaved macaroni and cheese in the dorms, but he managed. He left the business school after discovering everyone there seemed to be a complete idiot and got his accounting degree and master’s through the math department, hanging out in english classes the rest of the time to keep himself sane through the haze of convoluted numbers. He tried to balance socializing with hiding in his room, wasn’t very good at it, and wound up stressed from both sides. He had to submit to being locked in a supply closet during his forced shift, too. At home the space had been as nice as possible and there’d at least been other shapeshifted monsters for company.
Altogether he wasn’t very happy in school and was happy to escape, but entering the real world didn’t go very smoothly. It was hard to get work from any business when you’d inevitably cycle through monthly mood shifts and need a day off for every forced shift. Even when he could get hired, they’d usually find an excuse to get rid of him fairly soon.
And so he left the private sector. The money wasn’t as good in government, but there were a lot more rules and they were properly enforced. It was harder to worm around anti-discrimination laws when the guys who made them worked down the street. Lal started out as a lowly number-cruncher, but a boss with an interest in both lycanthropy and talking about Thackeray novels over lunch earned him a little more attention. Lal was a perfectly good accountant, but his real skill was being able to keep things running. The self-discipline he’d learned to work around his monster translated to reasonable middle management skills. He’d never be at the top of any ladder, lacking any impulse to power or even higher responsibility, but he’s very good at smoothing other people’s roads and keeping them on task. Humans (and assorted variations, and dragons, ultimately) aren’t that unlike dhole clans, whether he’d like to admit it or not.
Lal almost turned it down when offered the chance to be a government liaison and jack of all trades in Peridexion, but as he approached thirty, he was beginning to be discontented with his safe choices. It wasn’t likely that there’d be another chance to go on an adventure while on a government payroll and continuing to do what he did best.
Strengths:
By the book: If it’s on a page, Lal understands it. Academically, professionally, and practically, he has an encyclopaedic knowledge of how things should work and be done. In theory, anyway, which works out for him more often than not.
Open Minded: With one notable blind spot, Lal accepts things and people as they come. He has to be normal, whatever that means, but everyone else can do what they like, and he’ll just help them find the right paperwork.
Weaknesses:
Asocial butterfly: Lal is an introvert without people skills who needs to be around people almost all the time. The contradiction makes him nervous, stressed, and a bit weird, though admittedly he could manage that on his own. He has a bad habit of using alcohol as a crutch and embarrassing himself. It’s a purely social drinking problem.
Emotional marshmallow: In spite of his dhole side, Lal’s something of a natural coward with no core identity. He’ll never stand up for himself and he’s very easily manipulated.
What Work-Life Balance? Staying busy helps him cope with his were-related issues and lets him interact with people within the safe framework of his job, but he has no real social life, dreams, or direction beyond the office.
Magical Belongings: None
Position: Lal’s official title is Director of Business and Personnel Recordkeeping, but there aren’t that many experienced paper-slinging bureaucrats around and he’s an easy person to foist things on. He ends up with a lot of odd duties around civil administration and usually gets sent anyone with a question.
Played By: Avan Jogia
Writing Sample:
Being normal was a very unsatisfying life goal. It was fairly Sisyphean as tasks went, trying to match up with something that constantly shifted and was innately difficult to define, and the payoff was essentially nil. This struck Lal as a very wise bit of musing and he wished he had someone to share it with. Not for the first time, he wished he at least had a pet, but dogs and cats didn’t like him and anything that fell into more of a prey category seemed much too edible for about a week out of every month.
With a sigh he stretched out on the couch and opened the folder he’d been ignoring since he came home. While it contained a couple of cheerful, graphic-designed-to-death pamphlets and a DVD of a promotional video (the government did love its charmingly outdated bursts of technological innovation), he ignored the polished version and flipped through the familiarly dense printed pages outlining what his job would be and hinting at just how much fun it would be to deal with the resources available and reporting to both the local and federal government all the damn time.
Actually, considering the current state of his cubicle, it couldn’t be very different in terms of general privation or navigating petty personal politics. And there was the potential for some kind of excitement. Was excitement the right word? It would just be a new, small town with different people than he was used to, and that was the wrong kind of exciting entirely. Maybe he should call it an adventure, instead. That gave it more of a weight and made it sound simultaneously more and less like the tagline of a bad movie, which was sort of fun.
The kind of adventure where he’d keep his job and have reliably clean socks. That did seem to be the kind he was cut out for. Lal dropped the folder on his coffee table, mind almost made up, and headed to the kitchen to shut off the dinging rice cooker, pretty sure the decision was made.
Your Name: Siobhan
Your Age: 26
Contact: plurk: fiercebadrabbit, AIM: blitztsunami
Journal Name:
notafatfoxIC Info:
Name: Lal Banerjee
Age/Apparent Age: 28
Species: Werecreature
Type: Dhole
Magic Type: N/A
Powers: Lal has an enhanced sense of smell and sight and unusual strength and agility even as a human. He can turn into a stupid looking fat fox and a scary monster that vaguely resembles a stupid looking fat fox. His change is three days into the waxing moon. He has an affinity to and many personality traits of a dhole, but as he’s on the wrong continent to encounter any, this is mostly just a pain.
Special Abilities: Lal is aggressively efficient, unusual as that is for a bureaucrat. Whatever needs doing, as long as it’s a normal thing that normal people do, will get done double quick and be meticulously correct. He’s a rather mathematical thinker and his idea of logic can be a bit cold, but most people don’t quibble with results. He’s a competent percussionist (bass drum back in high school marching band, and he has a small collection of drums now), a pretty decent cook, and he has a knack for dissecting novels at entirely too much length. He speaks English, Hindi, and some Urdu.
Description: In his ordinary human form, Lal is fairly unremarkable. He’s on the short side of medium and, while surprisingly fit for a cubical dweller (like it or not he gets quite a workout around his moon), he generally dresses to hide it in shapeless polo shirts and khaki. His skin is deeply bronze with a reddish cast and he has a strong-featured, long face with especially expressive eyebrows. He wears his dark hair long, usually trying to coax it to be straight (though the slightest humidity makes it sproing back up into curls). He veers in and out of facial hair, usually sticking with a mustache and goatee when he’s in the mood to shave less. Lal has a ready smile that tends to look fake even when he means it and a general air of frenzied discombobulation that manifests in twitchy, closed body language that can abruptly snap into easy grace and speed when emergency arises. He tries not to use his lycanthropic edge.
As a dhole, he is a small canid with fluffy red fur, long legs, and a very poofy tail. It’s pretty adorable, though less so with his mouth open. It's not only full of very pointy teeth, as one would expect, but can gape unnervingly wide. He is very tired of explaining that he is, in fact, not a fat fox.
In his hybrid form, he is a snarling, monstrous, humanoid carnivore that should not be. He is still red and fluffy.
Personality: Lal is a hard person to interact with outside the strict framework of his job. He’s perfectly content when he’s answering questions about how to file business license paperwork or making reports to the home office, and if he’s occasionally a little awkward and makes bad jokes, he’s a good communicator. Run into him in the bar after work, however, and he’s much more easily thrown. He’s not good at small talk, veering from subject to subject with ill-judged babble about pet projects most of the time, and seems rather erratically interested and withdrawn from groups. If he wasn’t so good at his job, it’s unlikely anyone would want him around.
He was always a little socially unsure, but the odd contradiction isn’t really Lal’s fault. He’s a natural invert, and left to himself would sit at home watching documentaries and making cookies most of the time, but the dhole side of his nature won’t let him. Dholes are extremely social and live in massive packs, and too much time on his own makes him uncomfortable. His whole head is similarly divided. He’s a sedentary, gentle soul, and the dhole needs to run and fight. He’s a fussy vegetarian with a sweet tooth who can’t help wolfing pork chops for dinner around his moon shift and has an unfortunate chocolate allergy since the shift. It is, overall, a stressful disaster in Lal’s head, and it’s no wonder he throws himself into work all he can and spends unavoidable off hours being a discontented weirdo.
His bitterness about the change was enough to drive him away from his home and family entirely--he calls once a year on his mother’s birthday--but Lal was always a bit of a mess, unsure of himself or what he wanted, no strong identity or self-esteem. Being an unwilling were-dhole is just what he blames it on, regardless of whether it makes any sense. When he couldn’t stand the tedium of business school and switched to a hard-math version of accounting and added an English minor to keep himself sane, for instance, he defended himself to himself and anyone who’d listen for months afterward, convinced that this mild upending of his own expectations and the artificial social divide between words and numbers was a moral lapse that needed constant reframing and reinforcement. He is, in short, obnoxiously insecure, and has never been able to find anything to wrap his identity around since he rejected the family tradition. Running away was the only backbone he ever displayed in his life and it didn’t work out too well for him.
As annoying as he is, Lal basically means well. He likes people in a theoretical way, and the dhole makes him seek out people to stand next to, at the very least. He works for the government and makes sure, as such, to be a quiet and wishy-washy moderate on any issues with a political slant in there somewhere (and casting a cautiously wide net, that comes to just about all subjects), but while he’s never been involved in any kind of great good or broader movement, he makes an effort to be nice. He doesn’t mind fay and is even actively fond of dragons (though a lot of that comes down to being defiant to family tradition), sends checks to the kind of charities that feed hungry children and no one could object to, and even did a monthly afternoon at a soup kitchen before Peridexion.
The one group that Lal can’t stand is fellow werecreatures. Even knowing intellectually that most of them didn’t choose it, their mere presence makes him leery and moody. He blames this on the dhole’s hostility, but it’s really entirely him. It’s not a mean bone in his body so much as a frosty, sullen one, but it would certainly interfere with his somewhat fragile self-image as a nice, normal person with a problem if he didn’t have his monster side to blame it on.
History: Lal had a fairly normal childhood aside from having to lock his parents and, later, older sister and brother in a special room in the basement every new moon, something he assumed was normal until he started kindergarten and wound up having a few awkward conversations with a counselor before the school worked out what was going on. Perhaps it was that early indignity of having to be pulled out of class repeatedly that first set him down the road to questioning the party line.
Lal’s family had kept the werecreature line going for a half-dozen generations, considering it a blessing with a few untoward side effects and revering the fay who’d originally laid the spell on an ancestor who thrived on the magical benefits and freedom and managed to pass it on to the rest of the family. The family stayed firmly on the fay side of any magical disputes and passed the magic down generations. Lal couldn’t have been the first one to object, but he was certainly given the impression that he was. His parents were especially zealous about it, as were his mother’s two sisters and cousin who had also emigrated. It seemed very easy to lose the thread of tradition away from the family and in a new country where everything belonging to history was under threat. If they’d even given Lal time to think things through and grow out of a teenaged need to fit in and be normal, he might have come around to seeing the benefits of being able to turn into a cute but deadly predator. As it was, though he submitted to the bite when he was fifteen (after faking sick for a few days and wearing out his parents’ patience, leaving his moon change a little later than the rest of the family’s), he resented it thereafter and did everything he could to get out of the house and away.
He’d always been a good student, and he planned on going what he saw as the practical business school route. Lal managed to get enough scholarships and loans for the University of Pennsyvania without needing any help from his parents. He could have used it, certainly, and his first few years of college consisted of eating microwaved macaroni and cheese in the dorms, but he managed. He left the business school after discovering everyone there seemed to be a complete idiot and got his accounting degree and master’s through the math department, hanging out in english classes the rest of the time to keep himself sane through the haze of convoluted numbers. He tried to balance socializing with hiding in his room, wasn’t very good at it, and wound up stressed from both sides. He had to submit to being locked in a supply closet during his forced shift, too. At home the space had been as nice as possible and there’d at least been other shapeshifted monsters for company.
Altogether he wasn’t very happy in school and was happy to escape, but entering the real world didn’t go very smoothly. It was hard to get work from any business when you’d inevitably cycle through monthly mood shifts and need a day off for every forced shift. Even when he could get hired, they’d usually find an excuse to get rid of him fairly soon.
And so he left the private sector. The money wasn’t as good in government, but there were a lot more rules and they were properly enforced. It was harder to worm around anti-discrimination laws when the guys who made them worked down the street. Lal started out as a lowly number-cruncher, but a boss with an interest in both lycanthropy and talking about Thackeray novels over lunch earned him a little more attention. Lal was a perfectly good accountant, but his real skill was being able to keep things running. The self-discipline he’d learned to work around his monster translated to reasonable middle management skills. He’d never be at the top of any ladder, lacking any impulse to power or even higher responsibility, but he’s very good at smoothing other people’s roads and keeping them on task. Humans (and assorted variations, and dragons, ultimately) aren’t that unlike dhole clans, whether he’d like to admit it or not.
Lal almost turned it down when offered the chance to be a government liaison and jack of all trades in Peridexion, but as he approached thirty, he was beginning to be discontented with his safe choices. It wasn’t likely that there’d be another chance to go on an adventure while on a government payroll and continuing to do what he did best.
Strengths:
By the book: If it’s on a page, Lal understands it. Academically, professionally, and practically, he has an encyclopaedic knowledge of how things should work and be done. In theory, anyway, which works out for him more often than not.
Open Minded: With one notable blind spot, Lal accepts things and people as they come. He has to be normal, whatever that means, but everyone else can do what they like, and he’ll just help them find the right paperwork.
Weaknesses:
Asocial butterfly: Lal is an introvert without people skills who needs to be around people almost all the time. The contradiction makes him nervous, stressed, and a bit weird, though admittedly he could manage that on his own. He has a bad habit of using alcohol as a crutch and embarrassing himself. It’s a purely social drinking problem.
Emotional marshmallow: In spite of his dhole side, Lal’s something of a natural coward with no core identity. He’ll never stand up for himself and he’s very easily manipulated.
What Work-Life Balance? Staying busy helps him cope with his were-related issues and lets him interact with people within the safe framework of his job, but he has no real social life, dreams, or direction beyond the office.
Magical Belongings: None
Position: Lal’s official title is Director of Business and Personnel Recordkeeping, but there aren’t that many experienced paper-slinging bureaucrats around and he’s an easy person to foist things on. He ends up with a lot of odd duties around civil administration and usually gets sent anyone with a question.
Played By: Avan Jogia
Writing Sample:
Being normal was a very unsatisfying life goal. It was fairly Sisyphean as tasks went, trying to match up with something that constantly shifted and was innately difficult to define, and the payoff was essentially nil. This struck Lal as a very wise bit of musing and he wished he had someone to share it with. Not for the first time, he wished he at least had a pet, but dogs and cats didn’t like him and anything that fell into more of a prey category seemed much too edible for about a week out of every month.
With a sigh he stretched out on the couch and opened the folder he’d been ignoring since he came home. While it contained a couple of cheerful, graphic-designed-to-death pamphlets and a DVD of a promotional video (the government did love its charmingly outdated bursts of technological innovation), he ignored the polished version and flipped through the familiarly dense printed pages outlining what his job would be and hinting at just how much fun it would be to deal with the resources available and reporting to both the local and federal government all the damn time.
Actually, considering the current state of his cubicle, it couldn’t be very different in terms of general privation or navigating petty personal politics. And there was the potential for some kind of excitement. Was excitement the right word? It would just be a new, small town with different people than he was used to, and that was the wrong kind of exciting entirely. Maybe he should call it an adventure, instead. That gave it more of a weight and made it sound simultaneously more and less like the tagline of a bad movie, which was sort of fun.
The kind of adventure where he’d keep his job and have reliably clean socks. That did seem to be the kind he was cut out for. Lal dropped the folder on his coffee table, mind almost made up, and headed to the kitchen to shut off the dinging rice cooker, pretty sure the decision was made.