Character Outline
the Member
Alias: Neph
Age: 19
Origin: New Inkland
the Character
Vampire or Human?: Vampire
Avatar: Elijah Wood
Original Name: Thomas Little
Other Names: Tommy
Year of Birth: 1923
Current Age: 86
Occupation: Photographer
Appearance: Thomas is slightly built, not especially tall, and thin and wiry. He's fair-skinned with dark hair that he keeps generally short but a little longer on top, usually unbrushed or a little unkempt. His most distinguishing feature is his eyes, wide and a bright, clear blue. His face is sweet, even cherubic, with a small, full-lipped mouth and faintly elfin features. His clothing style is usually simple and he wears a lot of the same things day by day - jeans, casual shirts, a sports jacket if he has a gallery opening. His voice is a soft, almost husky tenor.
Personality: Thomas is frequently angry, not for any especial reason. He just feels, deep down, he has good reason to be. He doesn't always show it, though. His more active, even chipper facade is the one he wears most often. He is occasionally cynical but is generally soft-spoken. He doesn't speak much to people he doesn't feel are worth his time. He does things to extremes; there are no grey areas. He puts as much passion into his loves as his hates. His angers and obsessions and desires all act on their highest levels. He never does anything halfway, and he is a constant perfectionist. His relationship with his companion, Charlotte, also acts on two extremes - loving care and devotion, interspersed with bouts of incredible violence that can leave the human girl confined to bed for days at a time. As a photographer, he likes beauty, and he sees it everywhere, but he can be very particular about the way things are done and how they look. He is very clean, keeping his house and himself consistently spotless, even to the point of washing his hands a couple of times an hour. He is obsessive and holds onto things like his mind were a vise, keeping his own thoughts so deeply under pressure that when they burst, they don't just rise up - they explode. He has a terrible temper and it can be set off by the smallest of slights or situations. He's extremely self-conscious and takes comments on his appearance or self very personally. He is capable of holding grudges to Kingdom Come.
Strengths and Weaknesses:
Strengths:
+ Observant; sharp, if not necessarily intelligent
+ Clean, very precise
+ Talented; an excellent artistic phtographer, beginning to get some notice
+ Capable of loving or caring very deeply
+ Modest, but ambitious
Weaknesses:
- Occasionally lacking in common sense
- Too anal; too particular or picky
- Obsessive; dwells on things he shouldn't
- Extremely abusive
- Self-doubting and very self-conscious
Background: Thomas Little was born in Connecticut, 1923, to his underaged American mother, Darcy, (having gotten pregnant at age 14), and an unidentified father. Darcy Little refused to tell her family who the father was, even when she had to admit she was pregnant. She was immediately shunned by all of her relatives and was sent to England to live with her grandmother to carry the child to term and give it up for adoption before returning to Connecticut. In the end, her grandmother accepted her and her illegitimate child far more willingly than the rest of her family and would not allow Darcy to give Thomas up. She and her son lived with her grandmother until the grandmother died when Thomas was 3, leaving his granddaughter and great-grandson her cottage by the sea, a little ways from London.
Darcy's pregnancy was a hard one, and her post-partum depression severe, to the point where she would often neglect to breastfeed her son, leaving her grandmother to improvise and weaning him much too early. About 6 months after Thomas was born, his father - a British soldier 7 years Darcy's senior who had been on leave in America to visit his sister - tracked them down after insisting to the family that had all but disowned Darcy that he wanted to find her - and his son. He and Darcy married immediately and lived relatively happily together for years. Thomas idolized his father, constantly demanding stories of his time in the army, and his father indulged him implicitly. They were as happy a family as could be, despite their frowned-upon circumstances, until Thomas' father died of a mysterious illness when he was 7. Darcy remarried within a month...to Thomas' father's brother, John Rocco.
Rocco was a banker and made decent money. He was also even older than his brother, and was not at all opposed to having a pretty 21-year-old wife to show off. Thomas didn't like him, partly because he wasn't his father and partly because Rocco had a closet predeliction for young boys. By the time he was 9 years old, Thomas began making any excuse he could to be away from the house. Darcy didn't mind. He was always a weak, often sick boy, but when he began spending more time outside and by the sea in order to get away from his uncle/step-father, he grew stronger and healthier. He was always short and slight, but his spirit picked up, although he was often angry, and his mother didn't understand him. He had never told her about her husband's abuse. Around when he turned 14 and reached puberty, his step-father stopped, Thomas being too old by then for him to be interested. He soon divorced Darcy, after which Darcy became something of a recluse and relied far too much on wine and gin to keep her going. Thomas attempted to take care of his mother for a couple of years, but when he was 16, he grew tired and frustrated with picking up the pieces and left, lying about his age to join the British army like his father had. He never saw his mother again.
It was 1939 by this time, and World War II was already creeping into the British consciousness. Thomas was kept mainly on the island, observing and maintaining army-funded hospitals and kitchens until he was finally sent overseas at 17. He was sent to France first and moved to Germany. He, along with some other boy soldiers his age, had taken up in a tavern for a drink one night when they were approached by a member of the Nazi-party who had been recruiting, often quite forcefully, in the area. Thomas spent hours talking to him, until the other British boys finally pulled him out of the tavern, asking him what the hell he was doing. Thomas never answered when asked what the two spoke about, or he lied, but that night, Thomas went back and spent the night with the Nazi soldier, returning to his own base camp the next morning before anybody could surmise what had transpired. He had wondered about his sexuality for years, assuming it had been disturbed by his step-father. The night with the Nazi, which he told no one about even years later, changed his mind.
When he was 18, Thomas was sent to the front lines, along with what friends remained of those his age that he had bonded with over the past year and a half. The British and French sides were slaughtered by day and shared ghost stories by night in an attempt to keep people alert and keep up morale. The method backfired slightly, as the soldiers all told stories of a mysterious "ghost" who walked through the remains of the front lines at midnight to feed on the dead. Thomas didn't believe these stories until one day he was shot in the side and the leg. Assuming he was dead, he was left amid the rest of the bodies, but he woke, half-dead and in excrutiating pain at twilight. That night, he saw the "ghost" the soldiers had talked about - a tall man with unnaturally white skin and hellish red eyes. It was the last thing he saw before closing his eyes and muttering a Lord's Prayer under his breath.
He woke again in the morning, but not in the battlefield. He remembered only vaguely what had happened, but when the tall, pale man came back, he told him what had happened - that Thomas had been changed into a vampire. It took three or four days for him to recover, but in the end, he did, and he woke one morning a fully-fledged creature of the night. The pale man's name was Gideon, and he was the most beautiful, terrifying thing Thomas had ever seen.
Thomas lived with Gideon Knight for a little over a decade. Their relationship was not necessarily a romantic one. Gideon was not neglectful of hs fledgling; he seemed more fascinated with him than anything else, and treated him more or less like a low-level assistant. Thomas, however, was obsessed with Gideon, wanted to be romantically involved, and even convinced Gideon once or twice to sleep with him. It was never enough for Thomas, though, and it had a retroactive effect on Gideon. After these brief trysts, Gideon would grow angry with Thomas and insist quite forcefully that it couldn't happen again. In the end, confused and frustrated with Thomas' continued interest in him (interest he did not remotely return and couldn't have if he tried), he told Thomas he needed to leave and make a life elsewhere, his excuse being that he was only ever around to help him adjust to vampire life. Now that he was adjusted, he didn't need Gideon. In 1954, Gideon left Thomas in England and went to Denmark and Austria for a time before returning to England himself. Thomas had resigned himself to this and they hadn't parted on negative terms, but deep down, he was furious. His dangerous obsession with his sire never quite dissipated.
Thomas lived in England for some time, moving around, until he discovered that his mother had died years before, leaving her grandmother's cottage that she still owned empty. He moved in immediately, living alone and eventually taking up photography. He had a few relationships, but as they were always with humans, they were never allowed to last long. In 2003, he had gone to a zoo to take some photos of animals for a newspaper article on the place when he saw a group, he thought perhaps from a school or something, touring. One young girl caught his eye and he approached her, talking to her casually at first, talking about the weather and the animals, before suggesting more or less that he take her from her life (she had revealed that she was an orphan and named Charlotte) and that she run away with him. She agreed, and they have lived together since, never romantically involved though Thomas occasionally allowed the facade. Their relationship, despite Charlotte's infatuation, is not a good nor healthy one, and Thomas took to abuse fairly quickly and with startling ease. They still live in his great-grandmother's seaside cottage, although both work in London, and as she grows older, Thomas is getting nervous, wondering whether he should either change or abandon her before she gets too old.
RP Sample: Gideon, Marcel, Robyn, Sebastian ^^
