Post by BEN CREWE on Jun 4, 2011 3:35:55 GMT -5
BENJAMINCREWE
standin' at the crossroad, tried to flag a ride
didn't nobody seem to know me, babe, everybody pass me by
• • HOPE YOU GOT YOUR THINGS TOGETHER,
hope you are quite prepared to die
FULL NAME: Benjamin Robert Crewe
NICKNAME: Ben, Copper
AGE: 36
BIRTHDATE: January 4
SPECIES: Human
GENDER: Male
ORIENTATION: Gay
OCCUPATION: Musician
• • LOOKS LIKE WE'RE IN FOR NASTY WEATHER,
one eye is taken for an eye
FACE CLAIM: Christian Kane
SKIN: Pale, slightly weathered
HAIR: Either brownish blond or blondish brown depending on the season
EYES: Blue
HEIGHT: 6'4"
WEIGHT: 190lb.
OVERALL APPEARANCE: Ben's got the loose, gracefully graceless stance of a man who topped six feet by the time he was twelve and then spent ten years growing into it. He's long and lean, with a narrow sardonic face and deft callused hands. His hair falls to just past his shoulders, and he only ever ties it back when he's in private situations; in public it's always loose and shoved back casually off his forehead. Both ears are pierced, and he has a few tattoos tucked away where they don't show under his shirts. Overall he's just not handsome, that would be a terrible word to describe him. But some people find something arresting about him, some indefinable quality of confidence and wry humor that draws at a certain type of man (and woman) to make them want to know more.
• • DON'T GO AROUND TONIGHT,
well, it's bound to take your life
LIKES:
- The music. It starts and ends with the music for him and it always will.
- Juke joints
- Bourbon and branch water
- Really good pot
- Drama-free hookups
- His Browning Hi-Power
- His sister
- Fantasy novels
DISLIKES:
- Auto-tune
- The endless debate about DRM
- Computers
- Flying
- Inferior pot
- Pushy women
- Whiny men
- Thinking about his own past mistakes
STRENGTHS:
- Extremely talented and skillful musician
- Calm-hearted and not prone to overreaction
- Open to the possibility of something wonderful happening
- Widely-read and self-educated
- Many contacts in the music world
WEAKNESSES:
- Impulse control issues
- Some self-destructive behaviors, mostly having to do with his sexual orientation
- Bad at sacrificing himself for others, even in small ways
- His knowledge of the supernatural world is mostly from lore, not from the practical
- Expects other people to be as easygoing and casual as he is and is always shocked and grieved when they're not
FEARS:
- Arthritis
- That one well-wrapped package tucked into a safety deposit box someday coming back to haunt him
- How fast knowledge disappears
- Becoming a novelty act
- That the last of the supernatural world will die out in his lifetime
POWERS & ABILITIES: N/A
OVERALL PERSONALITY: Ben's thirty-six and still a child in many ways. He's never held down a 'real' job, never had a mortgage to pay or a family to care for, never had to make the hard choices that come from weighing the value of your happiness against someone else's. He's a smiling, charming bastard of a man with a lot of talent and a little bit of good luck to see him through the lean times. He's not a bad person, not an evil one, but he views the world through the lens of his easygoing selfishness and has a tendency not to think about the bad things because why bring yourself down?
• • THERE'S A BAD MOON ON THE RISE,
don't go around tonight
HISTORY: You don't hear about a lot of old-school bluesmen coming out of the wealthy suburbs of Manchester, England but it's not as crazy an idea as it sounds. Blue-eyed soul has never died out in the UK, and the Brits love the blues. It's just that a lot of them can't play it.
Ben's parents sat right on the dividing like between well-off and wealthy, and were only too happy to encourage their son's early talent with lessons, instruments, albums of any sort of musical genre that he found interesting. When he focused down on the blues before he turned twelve there were no naysayers in his life.
He achieved a mild local prominence even as a teenager, and when he finished his A-levels his parents sent him on a trip to the American South rather than a tour of Europe. He'd intended to come back to England and try his hand at the London music scene, but he caught a break in a Memphis blues club and got a business visa just to try out the real American blues experience. That was eighteen years ago and Ben's never really considered leaving after that first six months.
Being a successful blues musician isn't like being a successful musician in any of the other genres. One week it's a smoky roadhouse in the middle of nowhere, the next it's a blues festival in some predominantly-white suburb where you're being fed roasted-grape risotto instead of burnt ends and beer. And Ben loves it, all of it, every single bit. He's been on the road nearly constantly for the past fifteen years and there's no part of his life that he's truly dissatisfied with.
In fact, if there's any real regret in Ben's life, it's Alex. The whole thing was almost, not quite, an accident. Ben would like to pretend to himself that none of it was intentional, but that's crap and in his most honest moments he'll admit that. There he was, sitting on a spit of rock on the beach, trying to find some kind of inspiration for lyrics to go with the tune he'd been fiddling with lately when he saw the seal heave itself up onto the pebbled beach, then watched the shining pelt split and a beautiful man emerge and go walking naked up the beach. Could anyone resist that?, he asks himself. Could any man be expected not to at least try? He'd grown up on the same legends that any romantic boy does, he knew the legend of the selkie. It was almost too easy to slip down to the beach and retrieve the skin, lock it into a guitar case in the back of his truck and then go back down to wait for the seal-man to reappear.
The truth is that Ben liked the fighting. The shouting matches, the sparring of words and emotion. He told himself that Alex must like it too or he'd have just taken the pelt back by force. Weeks it went on. Months. It was exciting, consuming, and the night that they finally stopped hurling words at one another and grabbed for one another's bodies instead was flat-out incredible. Best sex of Ben's life, and he fell asleep wondering whether he'd been wrong about love being a fairy tale meant for song lyrics and chick movies.
In the morning Alex was gone. Ben tore half the city apart looking for him and then tore off in a rage, driving eight hundred miles to stash the pelt in a bank deposit box so that Alex could never find it, not without coming to him for it. And then he tried, badly, to forget all about his brush with the preternatural world.
But some part of him is always waiting. Watching the audience for a flash of overbright eyes and that funny, vulnerable tilt to the chin that Alex always got halfway through an argument. The part of him that's where the music comes from believes that they're going to bump into one another someday and maybe, possibly, they'll finish what they began.
• • WELL, IT'S BOUND TO TAKE YOUR LIFE,
there's a bad moon on the rise
ALIAS: Briar
OTHER ACCOUNTS: Rin Cooper, Wil Croft, Adam Milligan, Drew Copeland
EXPERIENCE: 15+ Years
WHERE DID YOU FIND US: Caution
ROLEPLAY SAMPLE: non-canon character
