Post by CONNOR JOHN O'BROGAN on Dec 2, 2012 10:28:06 GMT -5
[style=font-family: courier new; font-size: 10px; letter-spacing: 5px; text-transform: uppercase; color: #abbeb8; text-align: center;]don't get too close; it's dark inside.
IT'S WHERE MY DEMONS HIDE
Hey there! It's VELVET with a new character. I'm currently EIGHTEEN years old. This new character application is COMPLETE and my lovely new character is played by TOM HARDY.
CONNOR JOHN O'BROGAN
(MALE) (THIRTY-TWO) (HETEROFLEXIBLE) (HUNTER)
THE RELATIONSHIPS
MOTHER: Marilyn Knowles, deceased
FATHER: Peter O'Brogan, deceased
BROTHERS: none
SISTERS: none
SPOUSE: estranged wife, Nadine, deceased
CHILDREN: Kayleigh, four, deceased
PETS: none
OTHER: Numerous, all living in the UK, and have not been contacted since the outbreak.
THE APPEARANCE
If one was to ask him about his appearance, Connor would describe himself as 'one funny looking bastard'. His pale skin burns, rather than tans, at the merest glimpse of sun; his navy blue eyes hide under uneven eyebrows; his nose leans to one side as a souvenir of being broken; his ears protrude too far from either side of his head; slightly crooked teeth peek out from behind lips far too full for his face, seeming to dominate his other features. It's a face that perhaps might not be called handsome, if it weren't for the overwhelming natural charm of its owner. His disarming smile is bright as a dropped coin.
He stands at a height of merely five feet and nine inches, but what he lacks in height he makes up for in solidity: he is, in his own words, 'built like a brick shithouse'. His muscle stems from a lifetime of physical work and genuine use, rather than having been packed on artificially via the gym. Connor moves with the swaggering, loping gait of a panther.
Connor's hair, so dark brown it's almost black, is cropped close to his head for practicality's sake. In times past he tended to be clean-shaven, but since the outbreak all attempts to look presentable have by and large fallen by the wayside. From time to time he'll shave, but to wear a beard is simply more convenient. His choice of clothing is not much different from before the outbreak: fashion sense has always eluded him, the apocalypse has just made people less critical of his affinity for hideous trackies/joggers/sweatpants. He's never seen without his Doc Martens boots, claiming that you could drop a hammer on your feet and not feel it.
But of course, the feature that most people will first notice about him is his tattoos. Every inch of Connor's scarred and weathered skin is veiled in badly done ink: arms, hands, torso, legs, neck. Collected since he was a teenager, none of his tattoos have any particular meaning, and many have a rather home made quality - which explains the crooked outlines and occasional misspellings.
Or perhaps it's his accent that they'll notice. Connor grew up in England, amongst his mother's very English family, so although his language contains a few Irish dialect words inherited from his father, his accent doesn't reflect that. He speaks in the strong Estuary English favoured by the south east, full of lazy vowels and dropped consonants - tempered by just a hint of a country burr. It makes him sound a little oafish, but it's a precious symbol of his home.
He stands at a height of merely five feet and nine inches, but what he lacks in height he makes up for in solidity: he is, in his own words, 'built like a brick shithouse'. His muscle stems from a lifetime of physical work and genuine use, rather than having been packed on artificially via the gym. Connor moves with the swaggering, loping gait of a panther.
Connor's hair, so dark brown it's almost black, is cropped close to his head for practicality's sake. In times past he tended to be clean-shaven, but since the outbreak all attempts to look presentable have by and large fallen by the wayside. From time to time he'll shave, but to wear a beard is simply more convenient. His choice of clothing is not much different from before the outbreak: fashion sense has always eluded him, the apocalypse has just made people less critical of his affinity for hideous trackies/joggers/sweatpants. He's never seen without his Doc Martens boots, claiming that you could drop a hammer on your feet and not feel it.
But of course, the feature that most people will first notice about him is his tattoos. Every inch of Connor's scarred and weathered skin is veiled in badly done ink: arms, hands, torso, legs, neck. Collected since he was a teenager, none of his tattoos have any particular meaning, and many have a rather home made quality - which explains the crooked outlines and occasional misspellings.
Or perhaps it's his accent that they'll notice. Connor grew up in England, amongst his mother's very English family, so although his language contains a few Irish dialect words inherited from his father, his accent doesn't reflect that. He speaks in the strong Estuary English favoured by the south east, full of lazy vowels and dropped consonants - tempered by just a hint of a country burr. It makes him sound a little oafish, but it's a precious symbol of his home.
THE PERSONALITY
Connor is braving the apocalypse with a grin on his face and a devil may care attitude; he's brimming with bravado and possessed with a damn sight more courage than sense. He seems fearless, audacious, utterly unfettered by insecurities and concern for authority or social conventions. He doesn't speak before he thinks; often, he doesn't seem to think at all. Taking his motto from a Clash song - go easy, step lightly, stay free - he neither remembers yesterday nor wonders about tomorrow, and as such, his mind appears utterly devoid of melancholy. He truly lives from one moment to the next. Every risk he takes is fueled by the bitter freedom of someone with nothing left to lose.
Inherently social and gregarious, Connor craves human company; now, more than ever, he hates - dreads - fears to be alone. He's utterly at ease with himself, blessed with an unquestioning self-confidence that makes him nigh impossible to intimidate or embarrass. Strangers and superiors alike will be spoken to with a level of familiarity verging on affable disrespect. He's insouciant, brash, cocky, rough around the edges. He hasn't a drop of malice in him, but to hear his idea of banter you might be mistaken. He has a tongue-in-cheek sense of humour and considers himself witty, but many others merely think he's vulgar.
The rise of the dead may have changed his life irrevocably - but it hasn't changed his personality. The truth is, Connor was the same at seventeen as he is at thirty-two; the only difference now is that he has a gun in his hand and the insurmountable burden of sorrow he tries so hard to repress. He's a hedonist through and through, and it's only the threat of the infected constantly hanging over his head that stops him shirking work for more carnal activities. He tends towards recklessness and impulse, often leaving others to clean up after his mistakes - but he's also irrepressibly loyal, honest and straightforward. He's far from a hero, but underneath the devilish grin, he has more compassion than is common.
Connor is shameless and utterly unrepentant. But for all his chaos, he's genuinely a good man.
Inherently social and gregarious, Connor craves human company; now, more than ever, he hates - dreads - fears to be alone. He's utterly at ease with himself, blessed with an unquestioning self-confidence that makes him nigh impossible to intimidate or embarrass. Strangers and superiors alike will be spoken to with a level of familiarity verging on affable disrespect. He's insouciant, brash, cocky, rough around the edges. He hasn't a drop of malice in him, but to hear his idea of banter you might be mistaken. He has a tongue-in-cheek sense of humour and considers himself witty, but many others merely think he's vulgar.
The rise of the dead may have changed his life irrevocably - but it hasn't changed his personality. The truth is, Connor was the same at seventeen as he is at thirty-two; the only difference now is that he has a gun in his hand and the insurmountable burden of sorrow he tries so hard to repress. He's a hedonist through and through, and it's only the threat of the infected constantly hanging over his head that stops him shirking work for more carnal activities. He tends towards recklessness and impulse, often leaving others to clean up after his mistakes - but he's also irrepressibly loyal, honest and straightforward. He's far from a hero, but underneath the devilish grin, he has more compassion than is common.
Connor is shameless and utterly unrepentant. But for all his chaos, he's genuinely a good man.
THE HISTORY
BIRTHDAY: 11 October
NATIONALITY: English [Irish Ancestry]
An English-born, English-accented man with an unambiguously Irish name, living in America - it's something that has momentarily thrown a lot of people Connor has met. The story of his life is fairly straightforward, although not something that he tends to dwell on. Remembering the simpler times of the long-distant past is bittersweet: it inevitably, inescapably leads to the ghoulish events of the past year.
Connor was born in a small town in Essex, just near the border where south east England meets East Anglia. His father's family remained in Ireland, and Connor never had much contact with his paternal relatives; his mother's family, on the other hand, was both extensive and close-knit, having lived in that same town for generations. Although he had no siblings, his cousins - and the accompanying uncles and aunts, grandparents, great-grandparents - numbered high enough for him not to feel the lack of them. His mother worked primarily as a hairdresser; his father was a jack of all trades, tending to do odd jobs for the most part before trying his hand at something else. Later in life, Connor would find himself following a similar path.
His parents' marriage was turbulent, predominantly due to his father's frequent infidelity and the physical ramifications of his hot temper - which tended to be directed more towards Connor than his mother. He learned at a young age that the best course of action was simply to stay out of the way.
Nonetheless, he maintains that his childhood was a happy one. He always had company; he grew up secure, sure of his place in the world. At school he had a tendency to be disruptive and play the class clown, but outside of that he spent the majority of his hours outdoors. He grew up in the fields, trespassing through farmers' property; he fished for crabs in the local creek and learned to shoot a rifle and poach game birds from private land.
In his teenage years, rebellion inevitably reared its ugly head and he started to test boundaries, subconsciously questioning the power balance with the new knowledge that he was now taller than his father. But he wasn't really rebelling; he was merely behaving in the way that is so common in a small town with nothing else to do. Fights, stealing, drinking to excess. Exploiting the bad-boy mystique the girls at school seemed to think he had. None of his relatives so much as blinked an eye.
Life ticked along in its familiar, mundane way until he was seventeen: while trying to fix the satellite dish, Connor's father fell from the roof of their house and died. The shock was palpable and far-reaching; it extended beyond the immediate family and to all the people in the town who had known and loved him. School no longer seemed important; it hadn't felt important for a while, simply an aimless formality he was going through with because he didn't know what else to do. Connor dropped out of sixth form halfway through his failing A Levels and started looking for alternative occupation.
He didn't move out of his mother's house until he was twenty-three. By that time he had tried his hand at and subsequently lost patience with multiple apprenticeships, giving him a decent - if incomplete - grounding in many different trades. He did freelance painting and decorating work for neighbours, had a respectable go at carpentry, dabbled in plumbing, narrowly missed electrocution once or twice and decided anything involving wiring was something best avoided. By his mid twenties the options were shrinking and with his family's pressure to stop dicking about, he found himself getting his heavy goods vehicle licence and becoming a long distance lorry driver. Being behind the wheel he was in his element, but the solitude was something he found almost intolerable.
The jobs were always unimportant: they merely a necessity to fund the rent and his social life, which took place, by and large, in the pub. He went through various relationships, some more serious and some less so - but only one remains important.
Nadine was an international student at a nearby university, spending a year abroad before planning to return to the US. Maybe it was this time limit, this sense of an impending ending, that made their relationship become so intense so quickly. Maybe it was this intensity that caused Connor to make rash decisions. Or maybe that propensity for strong attachments was simply in his nature.
They married. They were, by all accounts, too young to get married; they were, by all accounts, making the most foolish decision of their lives to make such a commitment after having known each other for so short a time. But with the business of visas and green cards, it was all or nothing.
The first two years were the of the happiest of Connor's life. Adjusting to living in Boston was one culture shock after another, the loss of all his friends and family unfathomably jarring - but he and his wife were still in a stage where their differences were exciting rather than infuriating, and their daughter Kayleigh was the center of his world. But over time, more and more cracks started to show. Nadine hated his lack of ambition while she worked her fingers to the bone. She hated the way he would start drinking early in the afternoon and then didn't stop. The cultural divide between them, everything from their attitudes to their political stances to their language, seemed too wide to bridge. Only four years into their marriage, she asked him to move out.
Less than fifteen years after Connor's father had passed away, his mother died from asphyxiation caused by an allergic reaction to a bee sting. Her death was as unexpected and unlucky as his father's, but it devastated him far more as they had always been closer. After returning to England for the funeral, he had realised that his mother country no longer really felt like home.
It was very soon after Connor had returned to the US that the infection broke out; initially it was discounted as an unusual strain of rabies, no cause for panic or emergency. He had been staying with friends in another state when it reached a critical level. All he could think of was his family: his estranged wife and their daughter. He took only his truck and what weapons and supplies he could gather quickly.
The roads had turned to chaos, flooded with burning cars that had flipped over in the crush of vehicles trying to flee, surrounded by hordes of the undead. It took him days to reach their home. When he got there, the hallways of the apartment building were bloodstained, littered with half-eaten corpses. Their door was barricaded shut; it kept the dead out, but it was a dead end in itself, trapping them inside. With his heart thudding panic in his chest, he broke it down. It was still too late.
He found Nadine and their four year old daughter curled up together in the locked bedroom, an empty bottle of pills lying on its side.
At first he thought they were sleeping. His body reacted before his mind did; the smell of decomposition was understood on some primal, visceral, instinctive level before his grief-struck brain could process it. And then there was the note.
"There's no way out. I couldn't let her suffer through this. Connor, I don't know where you are, or if you're safe, but if you still have a choice there's only one good way for this to end..."
He pressed the barrel of the pistol to his temple. And then with a lurch the door swung off its hinges and he turned to see a staggering, shambling ghoul clawing towards him—
—and his bullet found a better mark, shattering the skull of his hellish pursuer.
After that there was no time. When one zombie came, others would not be long following; he had to get out. There was no time for last rites, no time for goodbyes, no time even to close the door. Without time to pause for even a second glance, he had no choice but to abandon his child to looters and infected. The pain almost swallowed him.
He didn't know if it was weeks that passed or merely days before he saw another human being. He banded together with a motley group of other survivors who were scouting out locations for somewhere that could be secured; by May 2012, they stumbled across Henley Falls. It was a long toil to clear it of the infected, harder still to keep order amongst the refugees who trickled in at first and then, as the months went on, poured in in droves. Being part of a community gave Connor a sense of purpose. A sense of a new beginning.
He was going to survive.
Connor was born in a small town in Essex, just near the border where south east England meets East Anglia. His father's family remained in Ireland, and Connor never had much contact with his paternal relatives; his mother's family, on the other hand, was both extensive and close-knit, having lived in that same town for generations. Although he had no siblings, his cousins - and the accompanying uncles and aunts, grandparents, great-grandparents - numbered high enough for him not to feel the lack of them. His mother worked primarily as a hairdresser; his father was a jack of all trades, tending to do odd jobs for the most part before trying his hand at something else. Later in life, Connor would find himself following a similar path.
His parents' marriage was turbulent, predominantly due to his father's frequent infidelity and the physical ramifications of his hot temper - which tended to be directed more towards Connor than his mother. He learned at a young age that the best course of action was simply to stay out of the way.
Nonetheless, he maintains that his childhood was a happy one. He always had company; he grew up secure, sure of his place in the world. At school he had a tendency to be disruptive and play the class clown, but outside of that he spent the majority of his hours outdoors. He grew up in the fields, trespassing through farmers' property; he fished for crabs in the local creek and learned to shoot a rifle and poach game birds from private land.
In his teenage years, rebellion inevitably reared its ugly head and he started to test boundaries, subconsciously questioning the power balance with the new knowledge that he was now taller than his father. But he wasn't really rebelling; he was merely behaving in the way that is so common in a small town with nothing else to do. Fights, stealing, drinking to excess. Exploiting the bad-boy mystique the girls at school seemed to think he had. None of his relatives so much as blinked an eye.
Life ticked along in its familiar, mundane way until he was seventeen: while trying to fix the satellite dish, Connor's father fell from the roof of their house and died. The shock was palpable and far-reaching; it extended beyond the immediate family and to all the people in the town who had known and loved him. School no longer seemed important; it hadn't felt important for a while, simply an aimless formality he was going through with because he didn't know what else to do. Connor dropped out of sixth form halfway through his failing A Levels and started looking for alternative occupation.
He didn't move out of his mother's house until he was twenty-three. By that time he had tried his hand at and subsequently lost patience with multiple apprenticeships, giving him a decent - if incomplete - grounding in many different trades. He did freelance painting and decorating work for neighbours, had a respectable go at carpentry, dabbled in plumbing, narrowly missed electrocution once or twice and decided anything involving wiring was something best avoided. By his mid twenties the options were shrinking and with his family's pressure to stop dicking about, he found himself getting his heavy goods vehicle licence and becoming a long distance lorry driver. Being behind the wheel he was in his element, but the solitude was something he found almost intolerable.
The jobs were always unimportant: they merely a necessity to fund the rent and his social life, which took place, by and large, in the pub. He went through various relationships, some more serious and some less so - but only one remains important.
Nadine was an international student at a nearby university, spending a year abroad before planning to return to the US. Maybe it was this time limit, this sense of an impending ending, that made their relationship become so intense so quickly. Maybe it was this intensity that caused Connor to make rash decisions. Or maybe that propensity for strong attachments was simply in his nature.
They married. They were, by all accounts, too young to get married; they were, by all accounts, making the most foolish decision of their lives to make such a commitment after having known each other for so short a time. But with the business of visas and green cards, it was all or nothing.
The first two years were the of the happiest of Connor's life. Adjusting to living in Boston was one culture shock after another, the loss of all his friends and family unfathomably jarring - but he and his wife were still in a stage where their differences were exciting rather than infuriating, and their daughter Kayleigh was the center of his world. But over time, more and more cracks started to show. Nadine hated his lack of ambition while she worked her fingers to the bone. She hated the way he would start drinking early in the afternoon and then didn't stop. The cultural divide between them, everything from their attitudes to their political stances to their language, seemed too wide to bridge. Only four years into their marriage, she asked him to move out.
Less than fifteen years after Connor's father had passed away, his mother died from asphyxiation caused by an allergic reaction to a bee sting. Her death was as unexpected and unlucky as his father's, but it devastated him far more as they had always been closer. After returning to England for the funeral, he had realised that his mother country no longer really felt like home.
It was very soon after Connor had returned to the US that the infection broke out; initially it was discounted as an unusual strain of rabies, no cause for panic or emergency. He had been staying with friends in another state when it reached a critical level. All he could think of was his family: his estranged wife and their daughter. He took only his truck and what weapons and supplies he could gather quickly.
The roads had turned to chaos, flooded with burning cars that had flipped over in the crush of vehicles trying to flee, surrounded by hordes of the undead. It took him days to reach their home. When he got there, the hallways of the apartment building were bloodstained, littered with half-eaten corpses. Their door was barricaded shut; it kept the dead out, but it was a dead end in itself, trapping them inside. With his heart thudding panic in his chest, he broke it down. It was still too late.
He found Nadine and their four year old daughter curled up together in the locked bedroom, an empty bottle of pills lying on its side.
At first he thought they were sleeping. His body reacted before his mind did; the smell of decomposition was understood on some primal, visceral, instinctive level before his grief-struck brain could process it. And then there was the note.
"There's no way out. I couldn't let her suffer through this. Connor, I don't know where you are, or if you're safe, but if you still have a choice there's only one good way for this to end..."
He pressed the barrel of the pistol to his temple. And then with a lurch the door swung off its hinges and he turned to see a staggering, shambling ghoul clawing towards him—
—and his bullet found a better mark, shattering the skull of his hellish pursuer.
After that there was no time. When one zombie came, others would not be long following; he had to get out. There was no time for last rites, no time for goodbyes, no time even to close the door. Without time to pause for even a second glance, he had no choice but to abandon his child to looters and infected. The pain almost swallowed him.
He didn't know if it was weeks that passed or merely days before he saw another human being. He banded together with a motley group of other survivors who were scouting out locations for somewhere that could be secured; by May 2012, they stumbled across Henley Falls. It was a long toil to clear it of the infected, harder still to keep order amongst the refugees who trickled in at first and then, as the months went on, poured in in droves. Being part of a community gave Connor a sense of purpose. A sense of a new beginning.
He was going to survive.
[/style]
