Ruby City Mods (
rubycitymods) wrote2012-01-13 01:45 pm
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APPLICATIONS
✗ Applications are processed weekly, every weekend. The cut-off time for the submission of applications is 11:59PST on Saturday.
✗ Before applying, please read the FAQ and Rules pages.
✗ Please submit your application with the journal you plan to use if you have one made already. If not, another journal is fine, but we prefer your intended journal so it makes for an easier time in granting access to the mod journal and the contacts page.
✗ For very long applications, we would ask you to please separate them into various comments so that they will not take up too much of the page.
✗ Please title your application as { [CANON/CANON OC/OC]CHARACTER NAME || Series Title || reserve/no reserve || X of X } in the subect header
✗ IMPORTANT: Our application form was edited on September 07, 2015. Please use the revised form.
✗ If you are looking for an example of what an application should be like, please refer to the application here for an example of a canon character application, and here for an original character application.
✗ Canon Application
✗ Canon OC Application
✗ OC Application
A note for CR AU applications
Ruby City does allow previous game history/CR to be brought over on a case by case basis. If you want to include this in your application please add additional sections for PERSONALITY DEVELOPMENT and PREVIOUS GAME HISTORY beneath the Personality and Background/History sections.
In these additional sections we would like to see a brief outline of your character's previous game history and how it potentially impacted on and altered their canon personality.
Czeslaw Meyer | Baccano! | reserved | 1/3
Name: Squiggles
Personal Journal:
E-mail: n/a (Plurk)
AIM/MSN/etc: scarfandjackets@AIM
CHARACTER
Name: Czeslaw Meyer
Canon: Baccano!
Timeline: summer 1932 (post Man in the Killer, ie. after the Flying Pussyfood events)
If playing another character from the same canon, how will you deal with this?: n/a
2/3
What most people would see when they meet Czeslaw Meyer is a polite, quiet, not-extraordinarily impressionable young boy. With a small build that makes him seem frail at times, dark hair and dark eyes, he doesn't stand out in a crowd through physical appearance alone, and his personality does not make him that much more memorable, either. If in a group, he would rather sit and let the conversation carry itself and only occasionally speak up, but he smiles cheerily like any other child his age, and has a slightly cheeky tone of voice - like any other child his age. Additionally, while his quieter demeanor might make him come off as shy, that is not entirely true; quite the contrary, actually. Czeslaw is shown to be rather friendly and quick to make acquaintances. For example, in 1931, he befriended Mary Beriam, a fellow passenger aboard a train, in a matter of hours and began exploring the train with her. Months later in summer of 1932, he addresses Firo Prochainezo, his roommate a man he met that January, with a brotherly attitude. However, that is only the side of his personality Czeslaw chooses to show.
Although he approaches the people around him with politeness, friendliness, and age-appropriate childishness, it is obvious to those who are (supposedly) closest to him to realize that Czeslaw has carefully constructed a wall between himself and other people. Firo especially has felt this wall several times, such as in Man in the Killer (summer 1932), when Czes responds to his roommate's joking sarcasm with a nonchalant "you're right; I'm sorry." According to Firo's observations, Czes has only opened his heart up to a very few select people - and he's right, of course. Despite his friendly attitude, Czeslaw is probably one of the most (if not the most) paranoid and suspicious characters in the entire Baccano! series… and for good reasons, too.
An immortal who has been alive for over two centuries by 1932, Czeslaw had led a life filled to the brim with physical and emotional torment (gross details omitted), despair, fear, distrust, and solitude. Betrayals (and abuse in one case) at the hands of people he once trusted left deep, painful scars that no amount of time or immortality could heal completely. After watching more than half of his friends be 'devoured' by Szilard Quates on the night after they obtained immortality, Czeslaw lived with his guardian, Fermet, who spent the next many years repeatedly hurting and killing him under the pretext that he was "testing the limits of [their] immortality." Czes, who finally snapped after years and years of this daily torture, devoured Fermet in order to escape. But because "devouring" Fermet also meant gaining all of the man's thoughts and memories (and everything else), that left Czes with the knowledge that his guardian only hurt him for his own amusement and held absolutely no love for him. He also "inherited" Fermet's tremendous fear of eventually being devoured by Czeslaw himself. In other words, since this moment he's been living with his own memories of being tortured, as well as the inherited memories of gleefully torturing himself for years. Fun, no?
Knowing that the man he trusted his life with had betrayed him in the worst way possible and fearing that everybody he knows could be an enemy fed Czeslaw's paranoia. With Maiza, Isaac, and Miria as definite exceptions, he is incredibly suspicious of other immortals and is convinced that one of them would eventually try to devour him. He has a strong paranoid survivalist mentality and, before he met Isaac and Miria in 1931, would go to extremes to protect himself. Such extremes included bargaining with a gangster to have him massacre some passengers aboard a train so he could weed out the one that regenerates - and devour him before he regained consciousness. The only rule Czeslaw had to control his cold, manipulative survival method was that he would not betray children who trusted him, as that meant he would be doing to those children exactly what had been done to him. That rule is a result of his paranoia regarding Fermet: after devouring him and gaining everything that was his, Czeslaw lives in constant fear that one day he would start acting like him.
On the topic of fears, the reason why Czelsaw is so terrified of being devoured is not because he is afraid of death. In fact, again before he met Isaac and Miria, Czes saw his eternal life as nothing more than hellish and wished strongly to be released from it. Actually, what he fears more than anything is the fact that if he were to be killed off, the immortal that devours him would also consume his and (consequently) Fermet's memories, finding out the truth about what their relationship was like. To Czeslaw, there is nothing more humiliating or mortifying than someone finding out how perverted their relationship had been or how twisted he had become as its aftermath. The reason for this was because Czeslaw, beneath his cold, cynical, and tough exterior, sincerely wished that he could be happy again, the way he was back before he became immortal in 1711. However, because of Szilard's betrayal and his awareness of his own changed personality, Czeslaw only felt the despair that his wish would never come true, and part of his survivalist rampage was caused by his struggle to destroy the depair along with the hope. Even now, after coming to New York and gaining something that resembles a functioning family that truly cares for him, he is unable to completely let go of this fear and will react with caution or terror whenever he meets an immortal from 1711. While he no longer goes out of his way to try to kill them, he never lets anybody's right hand (the hand used to devour) anywhere close to his head, and, as mentioned earlier, he does not let his guard down. The unease is also directed, although with less intensity, at the other immortals that he finds himself surrounded by in New York, who include people such as his roommate/sibling-figures, Firo and Ennis.
Additionally, as Claire Stanfield points out in 1931, Czeslaw has a deep fear of things he does not know or understand. Specifically, while the pain Fermet inflicted upon him left him with a "it can't be worse than anything I haven't seen already" mentality, that simultaneously fuels his strong fear that there might be a level of pain he doesn't know of yet. Usually, Czeslaw has no problem with serious injuries or fatal blows. He didn't bat an eyelash when Ladd Russo fired a rifle at his face, and in 2001 he even throws himself into a fireplace in order to burn the ropes he was tied up with. In both cases, he refers back to similar experiences from when he lived with Fermet (fantastic, don't you think?) But because he knows how much those can hurt, he is very afraid that something can hurt worse, and he also has a related fear of anything that is related to Claire Stanfield, who was the one to show him that there was, indeed, pain worse than what Fermet gave him. The trauma will haunt him for a long time, as while he doesn't away from them screaming and crying as he did from Claire in the 1930s, he still does his best to avoid that man's descendants seventy years later.
3/3
Who knows about Daedalus' Labyrinth on Crete? That's what I thought of when I heard about the catacombs we've got under this city. I guess these tunnels have got more than a Minotaur down there, but they're kind of similar, dontcha think? They say the Labyrinth was so complicated, even Daedalus had trouble getting out when he was done making it.
[Czes takes a pause, wondering if he should keep rambling about the myth. Deciding that would be unnecessary, he keeps going.]
I don't know a whole lot about this city yet, but I'm more curious about what's really goin' on in those tunnels. Maybe there's really a Minotaur hidden down there! [A small laugh.] Or maybe not, since the Minotaur was already killed by Theseus in that story...
... But I guess it's still a real dangerous place to go, huh? I wanna know more about it, but I don't want to get hurt, either.
--
Alternatively, here is a thread.
(Czes in this game is taken from the same pull point, and this his first thread in the entire game, so it is void of any in-game character development.)
Third Person:
At first, he thought he was dreaming.
The train was rattling quietly as he opened his eyes. He could feel the shaking through the seat he sat on and the window his head was leaning against. It was light outside, plains rolling past, stretching as far as he could see -- aah, he must be dreaming of the time he was riding the Flying Pussyfoot. That was a terrible trip, but it was an important one in his life as well (that was saying something, considering that he'd lived for a very long time), so it must have been on his mind as he went to sleep last night. On that train, he discovered many things. Things he lost, things he thought he would never have again. On one terrible, yet wonderful night in 1931...
Life after that was very peaceful. Sometimes it was hard, staying with Ennis and Firo and Maiza and the Martillo Camorra, but it was very peaceful. They were kind to him and that hurt his heart sometimes, but Czes knew that life in Manhattan was fun for him. It was something he could understand now. Even though the cammoristi and their friends reminded him always of how they were good people -- of how, compared to them, he was a very, very bad person. He was perfectly content with the fact that none of them wanted to hurt him. Yet, at least.
Aah, he should wake up. Feeling the train moving, Czes felt himself being lulled back to sleep. He should go to sleep here, and wake up in the real world. His bed in Firo's apartment was comfortable if not luxurious, and it would be better to wake up before it got too hot. Summer 1932, Manhattan was very hot and very humid, after all. Ennis must be up and making breakfast; Firo is probably getting up and ready to meet with the others, too -- Czes should wake up as well. He was going to Alveare with Firo today, they promised that last night. Isaac and Miria would be there, too.
He closed his eyes, and the strange, empty train faded from his mind.
ACCEPTED
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