PLAYER Name: Bella Age: 21 Personal Journal: None! E-mail: carbinestreak@gmail.com AIM/MSN/etc: Skype: Sonofajeffers, Tumblr: http://syntheticearth.tumblr.com/
CHARACTER
Name: Aquila. You're right. It's not a real name. But that's what he'll tell you.
Age: 24.
Appearance: A casual young Arab man; six foot one, in his mid twenties who keeps his hair short and his beard trimmed. With a slight slack in his posture and a moxie in his gate the lean figure never presents himself as particularly threatening, though confident and assertive with a firm and thick set of eyebrows that frame powerful brown eyes. At a glance, he's approachable and relaxed, fond of leaning back against walls and looking up. Voicing in at a low tenor, high baritone, his words tend to be eloquent though his Arabic accent tends to bleed through at any given time.
He has no tattoos, though the marks on his skin from bullets, knives, and other forms wounds such as burn marks or scarred welts from different methods of torture litter his body from head to toe. He wears these as casually as he'd wear tattoos, though, and doesn't seem all that opposed to explaining what they are, nor does he seem very upset about them. Torture, street fights, shootouts, boxing matches, you name it. He'd tell you about it if you asked the right questions.
He dresses like you'd expect any young man caught up in the throes of the Arab Spring revolutions to dress. Western influenced given the tee shirts and cargo pants and lace up Air Jordans and loose black or dark blue jeans, but with the distinctive scarf of Arab men printed with that almost net like pattern, a kufiyeh, around his neck or occasionally wrapped around his head. A simple thin silver chain with the Arabic name for God hanging from it hangs from his neck. However, his most defining article of clothing is the pair of black gloves made of Kevlar and carbon fiber weave to prevent cutting injuries or abrasions, with a solid metal padding around the knuckles but inside the fabric to give a bit more punch to his fists.
Though he is relatively laid back, he is almost always armed; a self made street brawler out of necessity with both fists and hidden blades, anything he could sneak by the tight control of the military police around his city. This does not make him belligerent; rather the knives and the padded knuckles are are safety measures. You do what you must to survive, after all.
He carries around a black and gray backpack with him, with all the tabs torn off to prevent jingling as he moves. In his sneakers he's learned to move quiet as a mouse when he needs to, and keeps a low profile with dark clothing in the shadows in general. Not strictly operating within the confines of a rather oppressive law, measures must be taken to prevent capture. He travels light and often, moving from place to place, though his backpack is assured to have an assortment of soft drinks of various origins he's picked up on the job, which he collects and enjoys in duller moments.
He can usually be found with his pet golden eagle, lovingly named Ill Eagle, whom he'd met as a young boy in a refugee camp in Syria. Ill is a golden eagle native to the area with a wonderful golden brown plumage and swift as any swallow and smart as any crow. He accompanies Aquila on his travels, though most of a time at a distance, though he comes when called, or when his master is asleep to sleep with one eye open, watchfully.
Chosen PB: Omar Borkan Al-Gala.
Personality: The word easygoing is one people often use to describe Aquila, and at a glance it's easy to tell this man isn't interested in making huge waves or being all that important, though he's social and approachable at any rate. Though not necessarily demure, he tends to accept and adapt to any situation that comes by in order to do what's asked of him, or, failing an issued directive, what he feels is a beneficial objective, like perhaps helping a displaced family find food, or delivering the more innocuous supplies necessary for those fighting the good fight. Never really having a solid lot in life with fortunes that change and shift like the sands in a storm, Aquila has been beaten back and forth around the Middle East and Asia from Morocco to Bangladesh, and even to the Americas and Europe a few times, and has learned to look at the hand he's dealt with an opportunistic and ironically grounded outlook, given his particular skill at handling aircraft in under-the-radar operations. There's nothing else to do other than do what has to be done to get where you feel is right, even if the means don't feel so stellar sometimes. Given a life so full of chaos in the war torn Middle East, it's hard to live with yourself without accepting that things are going to be shitty.
From that attitude spawns his wry humor and playful demeanor. A silly young man fond of soft drinks and a good laugh, not so strict on the ages old rule of abstinence, Aquila can be a fun person to be around, and almost always leaves a positive impression on the people he meets. He has a way of soothing the uneasy and making light of otherwise stressful tensions, perhaps a coping for the terrible things he bears witness to and the questionable things he does every day. It's a lifestyle. Being a thug is hard work.
Religion is a shifting thing in the world, constantly evolving though the previous generation is always so desperate to stop it. Aquila calls himself Muslim, prays the requisite prayers, thinks often of God, seeks his help in times of stress, thanks him for times of prosperity. But he refuses to believe that God and the idea of him can be fit into a canon restricted by the imagination and the words of humanity, and finds himself searching and discovering more of the Divine almost as a hobby, a piqued curiosity that he ponders in idle moments. He spends much of his spare time exploring faiths, questioning and examining and reflecting in mind and poetry the philosophies of mankind and its occasional intersections with divinity, looking for his answers rather than sitting back and making empty arguments or excuses to himself. Naturally superstitious in his own ways, his belief in the divine is serious, but detached.
However, beyond the relaxed and somewhat compassionate nature and his modernistic view of religion, perhaps the crux of his personality lies in his inability to trust that the ground will still be beneath his feet when next he looks down at it. The world moves so fast and the situations all so unsteady that Aquila plans never to be in one place for too long; consistency never truly a concept, nor a solid identity such as under a name. Unbidden, he'd never give a name, and bidden, he'd give this alias which means little and gives away even less. Trusting no one to the fullest, he prefers to do and almost always insists on doing everything he needs to do by his own hand, within fair reason and with awareness of his limitations and capabilities. Mysterious and dodgy almost naturally, he rarely reveals anything about himself or his motives without being asked the right questions, and tends to play coy about anything even when asked to the point of some frustration with the less patient. He gets a kick out of that; he enjoys the frustration of people who like having clear and consistent answers and those who like the security of being able to name something and describe it with words they understand. He's let the concept of his own identity be dispersed to the winds, and the better for it, since it leaves most with hardly anything to track him with. He does what he's asked to do, to the word and to the best of his abilities, though he carefully chooses who he wishes to obey.
As a result, as friendly as Aquila is, he doesn't make friends, or keep them for long if he does, preferring to remain the helpful stranger you run into on the street rather than the friend you can count on to be there when you need him. Each relationship is another thread that binds him for better or worse, threads that can be cut to leave him exposed or hurting, or threads that can snap as a rope keeping him from falling into the chasm. Too many people died and suffered around him because of their webs of emotional connections, enough to make him feel they would only land him in the same place buried in the sand.
It's worth nothing the subtle genuine bitterness in the sardonic attitude he has toward the situation of his world, clear that though he might hate the thought of it, he is human, and has a very human anger at the world he'd been born into, the situation a mess the responsibility of quite literally everyone involved. Strangely enough, this undercurrent of frustration feels so much more secure to feel connected to than another person. He lets his own jurisprudence guide him with the gentle nudging of his belief in the divine, looking for some justice, something akin to a better world; he seeks to find Rome a city of brick, and leave it a city of marble-- or give it his best shot.
World Information: Aquila is a fictional character in a non fictional world. Though some creative liberties are taken, Aquila fits into the category of 21st century frustrated Arab youth whose image and culture and history has been stained and cursed by both outsiders and insiders, tyrants and agitators alike. Aquila was born in the West Bank, but with the rapid and aggressive expansion of the settlement program in Israel, more and more Palestinian communities were evicted or destroyed if resistance was put up. Communities like these are cast to the wind for the most part with little chance of recourse, either forced to leave the country or flee to the contained pockets of Palestinian territory that may or may not be worse than a refugee camp. For fear of getting more political than most can handle, I won't expand much further on this, so it's safe to say Aquila comes from a real world scenario in the Middle East. [And there are plenty of Wikis you can consult for more details. :^)]
History: Around the time of the first Intifada in Palestine, a child was born. This was hardly the time for a child to be born, but as fate would have it, and verily fate could care less about his well being, it happened. Presumably lovers who were separated in many of the riots and following arrests and lengthy imprisonments, Aquila's parents died or went missing before his relevant memory. This left him an orphan without a clear cut community in the West Bank.
Fortunately, an orphanage took the small child in, and for a time he stayed there with the old sheikh who took care of them, in the name of God and in the example of their prophet. Here, he learned to read and write, memorized verses from the Quran, learned of the teachings of Mohammed, was instructed how to pray and how to prepare for prayer, all the things a little Muslim boy should learn.
This was fine for a time, before the settlement program continued to expand into this little village whose name was lost to the sand as the Israeli government demolished it to make room for the walled settlement complexes of their new immigrants. Once more, Aquila was cast off from what could have been home, rejected from entry into any of the Jordanian refugee camps, instead processed to Syria, one of two nations still sympathetic to the plight of Palestine in a real and supportive way, the other being Lebanon-- though it should be mentioned that neither country has had the most effective leadership to truly help the Palestinians.
Here, in the face of what a million people looked like in a refugee camp, Aquila decided it wasn't enough to live one day after the next and be shuffled around like cattle. God said to rise up against oppression, and he was rather tired of being pressed down, by anyone. The officials who controlled the aid brought to the camps, the mullahs who scolded him for stealing medicine and food to give to the sick refugees who couldn't make it for the day's handouts, the border patrols as he went back to Palestine, all of them found him a slippery fish to catch. He'd come back to his homeland with food, blankets, light bulbs, flashlights, televisions, GameBoys, knick knacks, cans of Pepsi cola, and kitkats, and then head back out again to pick it all up once more. The agents that did manage to catch him, frame him for smuggling arms, beat him, torture him, and scour him for information he didn't have were left with vague promises and well presented lies.
By all rights, Aquila committed many crimes. But to call him a criminal was a crime in itself. The young man joined a gang at first, back in the camps, moving small things, conveniences, food, toys. Medicines came next, a tricky and horrible business so tightly controlled you couldn't get a single Tylenol pill across the border without a stack of paperwork. Things got complicated then. There were competing interests, money changing hands, bullets in all the wrong places and directions, countless deals gone sour, questionable sources with questionable intent. He'd smuggled illegal narcotics and a gamut of things he could have gotten executed for, though never weapons; violence was something he refused to enable whenever possible. But he'd learned from his first more innocuous trips, and he'd learned from the best, even if the best were people he was sure he didn't like.
By now he doesn't argue against the charges that he's assisting terrorists-- his various connections and past deals and associating put him into contact with everyone on the CIA'S expansive hitlist, and even more on the IDF's, trying to get the things people needed, however possible. That was his life, still was, until he woke up one morning on a train to nowhere.
And to tell the truth, he probably doesn't miss it.
Re: REVISION REQUESTED
Name: Bella
Age: 21
Personal Journal: None!
E-mail: carbinestreak@gmail.com
AIM/MSN/etc: Skype: Sonofajeffers, Tumblr: http://syntheticearth.tumblr.com/
CHARACTER
Name: Aquila. You're right. It's not a real name. But that's what he'll tell you.
Age: 24.
Appearance: A casual young Arab man; six foot one, in his mid twenties who keeps his hair short and his beard trimmed. With a slight slack in his posture and a moxie in his gate the lean figure never presents himself as particularly threatening, though confident and assertive with a firm and thick set of eyebrows that frame powerful brown eyes. At a glance, he's approachable and relaxed, fond of leaning back against walls and looking up. Voicing in at a low tenor, high baritone, his words tend to be eloquent though his Arabic accent tends to bleed through at any given time.
He has no tattoos, though the marks on his skin from bullets, knives, and other forms wounds such as burn marks or scarred welts from different methods of torture litter his body from head to toe. He wears these as casually as he'd wear tattoos, though, and doesn't seem all that opposed to explaining what they are, nor does he seem very upset about them. Torture, street fights, shootouts, boxing matches, you name it. He'd tell you about it if you asked the right questions.
He dresses like you'd expect any young man caught up in the throes of the Arab Spring revolutions to dress. Western influenced given the tee shirts and cargo pants and lace up Air Jordans and loose black or dark blue jeans, but with the distinctive scarf of Arab men printed with that almost net like pattern, a kufiyeh, around his neck or occasionally wrapped around his head. A simple thin silver chain with the Arabic name for God hanging from it hangs from his neck. However, his most defining article of clothing is the pair of black gloves made of Kevlar and carbon fiber weave to prevent cutting injuries or abrasions, with a solid metal padding around the knuckles but inside the fabric to give a bit more punch to his fists.
Though he is relatively laid back, he is almost always armed; a self made street brawler out of necessity with both fists and hidden blades, anything he could sneak by the tight control of the military police around his city. This does not make him belligerent; rather the knives and the padded knuckles are are safety measures. You do what you must to survive, after all.
He carries around a black and gray backpack with him, with all the tabs torn off to prevent jingling as he moves. In his sneakers he's learned to move quiet as a mouse when he needs to, and keeps a low profile with dark clothing in the shadows in general. Not strictly operating within the confines of a rather oppressive law, measures must be taken to prevent capture. He travels light and often, moving from place to place, though his backpack is assured to have an assortment of soft drinks of various origins he's picked up on the job, which he collects and enjoys in duller moments.
He can usually be found with his pet golden eagle, lovingly named Ill Eagle, whom he'd met as a young boy in a refugee camp in Syria. Ill is a golden eagle native to the area with a wonderful golden brown plumage and swift as any swallow and smart as any crow. He accompanies Aquila on his travels, though most of a time at a distance, though he comes when called, or when his master is asleep to sleep with one eye open, watchfully.
Chosen PB: Omar Borkan Al-Gala.
Personality: The word easygoing is one people often use to describe Aquila, and at a glance it's easy to tell this man isn't interested in making huge waves or being all that important, though he's social and approachable at any rate. Though not necessarily demure, he tends to accept and adapt to any situation that comes by in order to do what's asked of him, or, failing an issued directive, what he feels is a beneficial objective, like perhaps helping a displaced family find food, or delivering the more innocuous supplies necessary for those fighting the good fight. Never really having a solid lot in life with fortunes that change and shift like the sands in a storm, Aquila has been beaten back and forth around the Middle East and Asia from Morocco to Bangladesh, and even to the Americas and Europe a few times, and has learned to look at the hand he's dealt with an opportunistic and ironically grounded outlook, given his particular skill at handling aircraft in under-the-radar operations. There's nothing else to do other than do what has to be done to get where you feel is right, even if the means don't feel so stellar sometimes. Given a life so full of chaos in the war torn Middle East, it's hard to live with yourself without accepting that things are going to be shitty.
From that attitude spawns his wry humor and playful demeanor. A silly young man fond of soft drinks and a good laugh, not so strict on the ages old rule of abstinence, Aquila can be a fun person to be around, and almost always leaves a positive impression on the people he meets. He has a way of soothing the uneasy and making light of otherwise stressful tensions, perhaps a coping for the terrible things he bears witness to and the questionable things he does every day. It's a lifestyle. Being a thug is hard work.
Religion is a shifting thing in the world, constantly evolving though the previous generation is always so desperate to stop it. Aquila calls himself Muslim, prays the requisite prayers, thinks often of God, seeks his help in times of stress, thanks him for times of prosperity. But he refuses to believe that God and the idea of him can be fit into a canon restricted by the imagination and the words of humanity, and finds himself searching and discovering more of the Divine almost as a hobby, a piqued curiosity that he ponders in idle moments. He spends much of his spare time exploring faiths, questioning and examining and reflecting in mind and poetry the philosophies of mankind and its occasional intersections with divinity, looking for his answers rather than sitting back and making empty arguments or excuses to himself. Naturally superstitious in his own ways, his belief in the divine is serious, but detached.
However, beyond the relaxed and somewhat compassionate nature and his modernistic view of religion, perhaps the crux of his personality lies in his inability to trust that the ground will still be beneath his feet when next he looks down at it. The world moves so fast and the situations all so unsteady that Aquila plans never to be in one place for too long; consistency never truly a concept, nor a solid identity such as under a name. Unbidden, he'd never give a name, and bidden, he'd give this alias which means little and gives away even less. Trusting no one to the fullest, he prefers to do and almost always insists on doing everything he needs to do by his own hand, within fair reason and with awareness of his limitations and capabilities. Mysterious and dodgy almost naturally, he rarely reveals anything about himself or his motives without being asked the right questions, and tends to play coy about anything even when asked to the point of some frustration with the less patient. He gets a kick out of that; he enjoys the frustration of people who like having clear and consistent answers and those who like the security of being able to name something and describe it with words they understand. He's let the concept of his own identity be dispersed to the winds, and the better for it, since it leaves most with hardly anything to track him with. He does what he's asked to do, to the word and to the best of his abilities, though he carefully chooses who he wishes to obey.
As a result, as friendly as Aquila is, he doesn't make friends, or keep them for long if he does, preferring to remain the helpful stranger you run into on the street rather than the friend you can count on to be there when you need him. Each relationship is another thread that binds him for better or worse, threads that can be cut to leave him exposed or hurting, or threads that can snap as a rope keeping him from falling into the chasm. Too many people died and suffered around him because of their webs of emotional connections, enough to make him feel they would only land him in the same place buried in the sand.
It's worth nothing the subtle genuine bitterness in the sardonic attitude he has toward the situation of his world, clear that though he might hate the thought of it, he is human, and has a very human anger at the world he'd been born into, the situation a mess the responsibility of quite literally everyone involved. Strangely enough, this undercurrent of frustration feels so much more secure to feel connected to than another person. He lets his own jurisprudence guide him with the gentle nudging of his belief in the divine, looking for some justice, something akin to a better world; he seeks to find Rome a city of brick, and leave it a city of marble-- or give it his best shot.
World Information: Aquila is a fictional character in a non fictional world. Though some creative liberties are taken, Aquila fits into the category of 21st century frustrated Arab youth whose image and culture and history has been stained and cursed by both outsiders and insiders, tyrants and agitators alike. Aquila was born in the West Bank, but with the rapid and aggressive expansion of the settlement program in Israel, more and more Palestinian communities were evicted or destroyed if resistance was put up. Communities like these are cast to the wind for the most part with little chance of recourse, either forced to leave the country or flee to the contained pockets of Palestinian territory that may or may not be worse than a refugee camp. For fear of getting more political than most can handle, I won't expand much further on this, so it's safe to say Aquila comes from a real world scenario in the Middle East. [And there are plenty of Wikis you can consult for more details. :^)]
History: Around the time of the first Intifada in Palestine, a child was born. This was hardly the time for a child to be born, but as fate would have it, and verily fate could care less about his well being, it happened. Presumably lovers who were separated in many of the riots and following arrests and lengthy imprisonments, Aquila's parents died or went missing before his relevant memory. This left him an orphan without a clear cut community in the West Bank.
Fortunately, an orphanage took the small child in, and for a time he stayed there with the old sheikh who took care of them, in the name of God and in the example of their prophet. Here, he learned to read and write, memorized verses from the Quran, learned of the teachings of Mohammed, was instructed how to pray and how to prepare for prayer, all the things a little Muslim boy should learn.
This was fine for a time, before the settlement program continued to expand into this little village whose name was lost to the sand as the Israeli government demolished it to make room for the walled settlement complexes of their new immigrants. Once more, Aquila was cast off from what could have been home, rejected from entry into any of the Jordanian refugee camps, instead processed to Syria, one of two nations still sympathetic to the plight of Palestine in a real and supportive way, the other being Lebanon-- though it should be mentioned that neither country has had the most effective leadership to truly help the Palestinians.
Here, in the face of what a million people looked like in a refugee camp, Aquila decided it wasn't enough to live one day after the next and be shuffled around like cattle. God said to rise up against oppression, and he was rather tired of being pressed down, by anyone. The officials who controlled the aid brought to the camps, the mullahs who scolded him for stealing medicine and food to give to the sick refugees who couldn't make it for the day's handouts, the border patrols as he went back to Palestine, all of them found him a slippery fish to catch. He'd come back to his homeland with food, blankets, light bulbs, flashlights, televisions, GameBoys, knick knacks, cans of Pepsi cola, and kitkats, and then head back out again to pick it all up once more. The agents that did manage to catch him, frame him for smuggling arms, beat him, torture him, and scour him for information he didn't have were left with vague promises and well presented lies.
By all rights, Aquila committed many crimes. But to call him a criminal was a crime in itself. The young man joined a gang at first, back in the camps, moving small things, conveniences, food, toys. Medicines came next, a tricky and horrible business so tightly controlled you couldn't get a single Tylenol pill across the border without a stack of paperwork. Things got complicated then. There were competing interests, money changing hands, bullets in all the wrong places and directions, countless deals gone sour, questionable sources with questionable intent. He'd smuggled illegal narcotics and a gamut of things he could have gotten executed for, though never weapons; violence was something he refused to enable whenever possible. But he'd learned from his first more innocuous trips, and he'd learned from the best, even if the best were people he was sure he didn't like.
By now he doesn't argue against the charges that he's assisting terrorists-- his various connections and past deals and associating put him into contact with everyone on the CIA'S expansive hitlist, and even more on the IDF's, trying to get the things people needed, however possible. That was his life, still was, until he woke up one morning on a train to nowhere.
And to tell the truth, he probably doesn't miss it.