Post by shawn hadley bard on Apr 2, 2012 23:26:43 GMT -5
SHAWN HADLEY BARD
FULL NAME: Shawn Hadley Bard
NICK NAME: The Bard or just Bard
AGE: 25
COMMUNITY SUPPORT: Hearth Tavern Barkeep
ORIENTATION: Heterosexual
SPIRIT AND MOVIE: Alan-a-Dale from Robin Hood
FACE CLAIM: Bastien Bonizec
EYE COLOR: Blue
HAIR COLOR: Bright Red
HEIGHT AND WEIGHT: Tall, around 6'2" and impossibly skinny
DESCRIPTION: The first thing you'd notice about Shawn is his hair--strikingly red and choppy, his hair nearly always stands up in a style the mimics a rooster's comb (or fauxhawk, whatever). Shawn never wears his hair like this intentionally, though. It's rather a side effect of Alan-a-Dale's Spirit in him, and at first Shawn even tried to fight it. He'd brush it, gel it, even going so far as to cut it once, but it would simply grow back and shape itself into the iconic crest. After a while Shawn stopped bothering it, resigning his ginger fringe to the birdie bard.
Shawn is tall, though not extraordinarily so (his hair might give him a bit extra height...). He stands on skinny chicken legs that he usually hides beneath jeans (regular-type boy jeans. Not skinny jeans. God never skinny jeans.), but even then it's apparent how knobby his knees are. But that's not to say Shawn isn't muscled--his days in the army kept and keep him fit. He's been slacking off though, since coming to Memory, and some days Shawn could not say he missed the rigor and routine of army life. Other days, he can't stand not to have the structure.
His face is a bit too bizarre to be called handsome upon first glance: his eyes are as blue as his hair is red, his skin typically ginger-kid pale, mouth too wide. But Shawn always has a pleasing smile on his too-wide mouth, a happy light in his eyes. He's always out and about town so his face soon becomes a recognizable one, and with enough exposure, the eye can rationalize any fault. Maybe his hair is more cool than kooky, maybe his folk songs and melodies, sung in his gentle voice, make him more approachable. To this end, Shawn does not dress eccentrically to put people off. He's normally found in jeans and tee shirt, a black, unbuttoned vest thrown over top when he works at Hearth Tavern. Shawn's never been particularly fussy about his appearance, but he tries not let himself look like a total slob. There's a certain amount of army know-how still in him that wants his head shaved, his boots shined, and slacks pressed. Shawn has to keep reminding himself those days are over.
PERSONALITY: Simultaneously realistic and idealistic, Shawn sometimes struggles with his outlook on the world. Shawn himself was sobered by the war, and lost a lot of the spark and hope and optimism he had as a kid. Shawn has seen some shit, and there's no way he could come out the other side completely unaffected. However, Alan-a-Dale has helped Shawn regain a sense of his former self, bringing him back to the days when his biggest worry was if he'd be found in hide-and-seek. Mostly Shawn gives over to this more relaxed, familiar way of life he grew up with, but occasionally Shawn can't help but see the world for what it really is.
That said, Shawn can be easy going and genuinely friendly, taking the time to talk with anyone about anything and actually care. He isn't the type who, during a conversation, basically just waits for the other person to stop talking so he can talk about himself--he cares about what people has to say. He listens, and he remembers. People matter to him, and he wants to make them happy any way he can. To this end, Shawn is also perfectly happy to entertain anyone, young or old, with his stories and tales and songs, which are usually improvised on the spot. Longer epics, of course, he writes down and refines with rhyme and lyric balance, showing off his talents as a true bard. But Shawn's just in it for other people, happy to make others smile.
Not everyone likes how chatty he is, though, thinking him nosy and a busybody. He's always out and about town if he's not working at the tavern, not being one (anymore) for adventures or going off to be by himself. Shawn hates to be alone now, actually, as that leaves him to recount his past failures and violence in a way he can't handle. He wants to live only for the present--not the past, and not the future. He knows the here and now and that's all he cares about. That, too, can put some people off. Shawn's not a private person (though he is about some things in his past), and he hopes this attitude will make it less weird when Alan-a-Dale eventually tells him all about everyone. Shawn tries to reciprocate his sometimes omniscient knowledge about people, but there's still no denying that this friendly Southern gent sometimes knows too much. It's unsettling.
HAS BEEN LIVING IN MEMORY: 3 1/2 years
HOMETOWN: Richmond, Virginia
FAMILY MEMBERS: Robert "Bob" Bard, Father
Susanna "Sue" Bard, nee Miller, Mother
Rita Close nee Bard, younger sister
HISTORY: The Bards are pretty plain folk, settled in Richmond, Virginia. They live in an average house--brick and mortar and squeezed between two other brick houses--with an average yard, on an average street. The hustle and bustle of the city doesn't always reach them here, towards the outskirts of the circle, but they're close enough to the action that they're well informed of the goings-on of the city. They get on well with their neighbors, who were friendly enough to welcome them into their neighborhood the day they moved in. Susanna was pregnant with their first child, Bob was proud as a peacock, and really, everything was coming up roses. Susanna remembers their first days in their new home fondly, reckoning that she was so pleased while she was carrying Shawn, she couldn't help singing. "And what a voice your mamma has," Bob would tell his son, smiling away at his wife.
Shawn was born the first of two to Sue and Bob, his little sister Rita following two years later. Shawn and Rita didn't often give their parents trouble (Rita was a hellion on her own though), and they got along as well as could be expected. His childhood was filled with normal little kid stuff--he spent more time playing in the neighbor's yards, bouncing from house to house with the group of boys and girls his age who also lived on their street. There was school and school bullies, kickball and scraped knees, faces freckled by the sun and early morning cartoons. Shawn always woke before the sun--he didn't know why--and always watched it come up over the tops of the skinny, tall, two-story houses. The sun would leak through the lace curtains his mamma had gotten from Grannie, and Shawn would pick at the pattern it threw on wood floors. A normal childhood in a relaxed environment--even in the city, the Bards didn't have trouble giving their kids a proper home and life.
Shawn was maybe a little more curious than his sister, as he was sometimes a more solitary creature. It's been established that Shawn is a ridiculously early riser, eyes opening as the cock crows, as the expression goes. He was responsible without having to be told what do: he finished his homework, came in from outside as started getting dark, went to bed on time. He wasn't wanting for friends, though. Shawn always had some group of friends or other with which to do whatever kids do, and his parents were always encouraging him to be pleasant and friendly to everyone he met. He was raised kindly and patiently, and these traits rubbed off easily on Shawn.
Come middle school, America was going to war. Shawn was a good-hearted kid who never wished harm on anyone, but there was a sense of duty instilled in him from his responsibilities at home, and the fact that his father had been a military man in Vietnam. There wasn't anything Shawn could do about the war at the moment, and it was painful to see the older boys he'd always idolized on his street joining up, shipping off, and coming home with flags on their coffins. That rattled him the most, how fragile those big boys really were. He saw the grief of his neighbors when their sons and daughters died, among the first dead in a war that hadn't ended yet. Shawn had to do something--he'd known these families so well, known these older boys and girls. He found himself needing to do something, anything, to help ease the pain.
It was then Shawn found he had a knack for singing. He'd played the guitar a little in middle school, but come high school and the war, some hidden wealth of talent was tapped, and music flowed out of him more easily than he could have imagined. He was putting his feelings and his heart into his music, writing about those kids he knew and helping those families through their pain with his music. He didn't know if it would help, but for whatever reason, it did. Maybe it was the way he sang, gentle and heartfelt, or the lyrics he wrote, true to life. His music had a powerful quality that helped folks see the brighter side of things, and Shawn recognized this. So in his senior year of high school, Shawn signed up to the join the army himself, hoping to help the men and women there, and to serve his country as was his patriotic duty.
Shawn wasn't ready for the fast pace and high intensity of even basic training. He struggled at first to keep up with everything, retiring to the barracks after a long day with hardly enough energy to even kick off his boots. But in the few spare moments he got, Shawn was still writing music (though the lack of musical instrument sometimes made things tough), and telling stories. Shawn had such a gift for telling stories--anything from tall tales to jokes to ghost stories--that those in his company were soon calling him "Bard" in a way that was more than just his last name.
And then came Afghanistan. Shawn wasn't ready, never really ready, but he had to do it. He had to live for the boy and girls he knew who died, he had make his parents proud, he had to show his country. The war changed him slowly, made him more closed off, more alert, more ready. His smiles were replaced with lips taught in concentration, his observations about life turned to strategy, his wit to survival. He tried to maintain a semblance of his former life by joking and laughing and telling stories like he used to, but it was getting more and more difficult the longer he spent fighting and becoming the man, he now knows, he wasn't supposed to be.
Shawn broke when he killed a man.
It was an IED. It exploded in the road and killed the driver and gunman of the humvee Shawn was riding in, but he came out the other side with hardly more than a broken wrist. He lay dazed, clinging to the bodies of his dead friends and sobbing so hard no sound actually came out, when a man approached. Shawn heard him coming and scrambled for his weapon, shaking so badly he knew he'd be done for. But as the other man saw him move and made to draw his own gun, Shawn fired. The bullet found the man's neck, and it soon as it did, Shawn screamed.
And screamed.
There was a voice in his head. A voice in a slow southern drawl that wasn't his own, a voice that told him that everything was going to be alright, and to just lie still. Let me tell yah a story, now, the voice tried to soothe him, and he told him a story all about his two dead friends--he told him everything. It was like this voice was a narrator to their lives, but between the three bodies surrounding Shawn and the blood on his own hands and the guilt that this was not how his momma raised him and and and... This voice was no comfort to him. This voice lead to Shawn's discharge on personality disorder.
He was returned to his unit not the same man he was. He'd been changing for a while, becoming what he thought a soldier was, but he knew now, and the voice kept telling him, that he was no soldier. He was just a simple story teller that couldn't do no good killin' people, and this voice was bound and determined to get Shawn out of there. The voice manifested in strange ways, changing Shawn's voice and thoughts and making him tell the story of Robin Hood over and over and over. Shawn was discharged and sent to recuperate stateside, undergoing months of psychiatric testing. During these tests, the voice would remain frustratingly silent, and Shawn was simply diagnosed with PTSD. It didn't feel simple. Nothing was simple now.
Returning home, Shawn knew he'd failed. Maybe he managed to boost the morale of his unit with his songs and stories while he was there, but the minute he pulled that trigger, something in Shawn woke up that needed him out of Afghanistan and back home. The voice had accomplished what it set out to do, and during the long days and nights Shawn spent locked in his room, it would talk to him. Explain things. Narrate. There was nothing for it but for Shawn to resign himself to the voice, and things... well, they started getting better.
Shawn tried, god knows he tried. And Alan-a-Dale, Shawn now knew him to be, couldn't fault him for wanting to help where he could. But Alan-a-Dale needed this host alive, so with a comforting voice a slow, steady song, he helped Shawn confront his demons and start to heal. Even at the end of all things, if Shawn was more guarded than he once was, he was alive. He was more careful now, less idyllic and more realistic, but he was still breathing and writing and thinking. He just now had another occupant in his head, who could weave a tale better than any he knew, and who knew all about a person just by a shake of their hand.
Alan-a-Dale wouldn't always tell Shawn everything he knew as a narrator of lives, taking things slow. But his presence in Shawn's mind had him eventually warming up to the Spirit, and by the time Shawn got a strange letter from Memory, he knew he had to go. He needed the change, to get away from his guilt and his failure and to start somewhere fresh with new people and new stories and new songs. Alan-a-Dale wasn't going away any time soon, and Shawn had to learn and relearn how to live with him.
Shawn has been living in Memory for three and a half years now, and in that time he's seen many new people move to the town. Shawn had gotten a job at the tavern at the request of Alan-a-Dale, and the environment allowed Spirit and host to work together. Moving to Memory heightened Alan-a-Dale's abilities, but Shawn is still not able to control them very well. He doesn't know when the Spirit will narrate to him the life of another, or when the songs he sings are his own or Alan-a-Dale's. They had a rough start but there was no denying the Spirit helped Shawn through his crises, and Shawn is grateful to him. He's steadily returned to the way he used to be, with Alan-a-Dale's help, and moving to Memory was absolutely the best thing for him--for both of them.
DISNEY CHARACTER: Alan-a-Dale, the Rooster from Robin Hood
STATUS: Awakened
ABILITIES/ATTRIBUTES: Has a special talent for storytelling, composing, singing, and playing various stringed instruments. In special circumstances, can become semi-omniscient about certain people in their present state, able to narrate their current happenings. His folk tunes have the ability to boost morale and revive the spirit, though not in the physical healing sense.
DESCRIPTION: Since Alan-a-Dale introduces himself as the Narrator/Bard of Robin Hood, he identifies strongly as that character rather than as one of the band of Robin's Merry Men. He is the all-knowing narrator of Robin Hood's feats of daring-do, and as such, is curiously attached to Robin's story more than to Robin (and his host) himself. The ability transfers over to Shawn in the way that when Shawn becomes particularly close to someone, their stories become clear to him, presented in song. Which admittedly is rather cheesy, and sometimes Shawn detests knowing so much about someone when they know much less of him. He cannot predict or control at what point he will hear a person's story sung to him, and Alan-a-Dale is careful to leave no secret overlooked. Mostly, this talent is embarrassing at best, since Shawn has no evil intentions.
Alan-a-Dale also lends Shawn his incredible aptitude for music and the art of storytelling, making Shawn a modern day bard. His job at the Hearth Tavern as a barkeep is suited perfectly for just such a talent, as gossip and news and tales run rampant in that atmosphere. Shawn participates in and contributes to town goings-on in this way, keeping himself and everyone he talks to up to date on all things Memory. Alan-a-Dale takes over then, spinning the characters and news and gossip into songs that pour out of Shawn, set to the gentle strumming of the guitar. This music has the occasional, curious effect of lightening the moods of the people who hear him, of revitalizing the spirit. This does not happen all the time, but when it does, it is some powerful stuff.
YOUR NAME: Rin
YOUR AGE: 20
YOUR RP EXPERIENCE: Near 10 years or so
YOUR SAMPLE: Arch's bad mood had quickly evaporated, that much he knew. But at the moment, he almost longed for the familiar comfort of his little-boy-esque rage, rather than try to navigate what the hell was going on with the girl, and this bracelet, and this bundle of energy bouncing around his brain in a way he'd not felt before.
Arch took a step back when Sophie looked up at him, the same confusion reflected in her eyes. Well, great. Good to know that this sort of reaction wasn't common in Memory after all. Arch felt like he was fuckin' destined to be the weird one wherever he went. Fantastic. He rubbed the back of his neck and frowned when Sophie looked away from him, turning her gaze to the flowers behind him. Well he guessed whatever this conversation was, it was over, and Arch would now get to ponder his strangeness in the comfort of solitude.
Oh god it sounded like the beginning of some angsty teenage poetry.
But soon Sophie was directing him to look at the ground behind him. Arch dropped his hand and raised his his eyebrows, turning with interest to what she was pointing at. "Pretty...?" He offered at first, looking at between her and flowers when they just started sprouting up. That was pretty cool, he'd admit. He was still getting used to the whole "magic" thing of the town anyway, but as impressive as those flowers were... What was trying to show him? Or was she changing the subject?
Until, of course, the flowers bloomed and Arch could read the message. Check it again: Arch could read the flowers. Sophie was communicating through plants, oh god that was so cool. Arch's face lit up like a little kid's on Christmas when he saw what Sophie was doing. "Oh no way," he said quickly as he scanned the flowers again, turning excitedly to the petite girl beside him. He smiled widely and nodded enthusiastically at her, relief flooding him when he realized he wasn't the only one who felt the connection. And she mentioned the bracelet, so he knew she felt something, like actually felt.
Arch searched around for a way to continue the conversation, explain himself. Because he could feel that pull to her, like an actual chain coming out of his chest to wrap around her heart. It was... It was definitely not a feeling he had experienced before, and the only way he could think to communicate that was to draw it out. Arch quickly retrieved his stick and scribbled out a couple heart shapes with a chain linking them. He hesitated before looking back up at her from where he kneeled on the ground, unsure if this would put her off. He took a breath and chanced a glance at her, his brows furrowed as if he didn't expect much. After all, how could they be connected? She could very clearly use magic, whereas Arch, just as clearly, couldn't.