(no subject)
the basics.
Name: Richard (Rick) Harrison Jones IV.
Age: 38.
Birthdate: April 23rd..
Location: (Currently) New York City, New York.
Occupation: Professor of History at NYU's College of Arts and Sciences. Treasure Hunter.
the tale.
Character: The King.
Tale: Grimm's The Six Swans.
Ability, if any: None.
Relationship: Rick and the King don't have a whole lot to coincide on, to be honest. The King was a peripheral role in the tale, existing primarily to both love and test the fidelity of the Sister. He was generally a stand-up guy, if a bit too much under his mother's thumb. While Rick would like to say that only that unswerving romantic fidelity came through to this reincarnation, he knows damn well it'd be a flat out lie: not only because Rick and romance have never quite worked out, but because Rick has retained that same obedience to parental figures that his predecessor had, to an uncomfortable degree. His father, much like the King's mother, is one of the only people who can browbeat him round to their way of thinking. It isn't instantaneous and often includes heavy fighting, but after a while, Rick almost always ends up simply doing as his father says. Even at almost 40, Dad's word is still the final say. How much this has to do with Rick's Tale and with Richard Sr being an indomitable old codger is hard to say.
Rick has also managed to carry over an affinity for the Swan Sister--in this case, Cygna. He remembers almost every reincarnation of her, who she was, how they ended up. Sometimes they fell in love; sometimes they never even met. It varied from lifetime to lifetime. This time around, he does not carry nearly the same romantic sentiment as the King, and the lingering fondness and care for the Sister is a muddle of confusion and "DO NOT WANT" in his head. As it stands, he keeps her around for whatever reason he can't fathom; it certainly isn't love by any means, but he simply can't do with not having her there.
Tale Status: Generally unknown. Not by any particular endeavour of his own, but simply that it's such an obscure story and has so little bearing on his day-to-day life. If people ask, he'll tell them, and his general association with Cygna usually alerts them to at least some Tale-relationship.
personality.
First Impression: "Well! What a pleasant man."
Personality: To put it simply, Rick is the Pentamerone's answer to Indiana Jones. He is smart, sharp, lucky, and a moonlighting treasure hunter. That's right. Treasure hunter. When he isn't making the girls swoon in his history classes with his everyman charm and rugged good looks, Rick is off in the wilds of the Amazon Basin, hunting down the Shrine of the Golden Monkey or some such. But that's neither here nor there. On an everyday basis, Rick is your relatively average, confident, moderately charming almost-40-year-old. He's past the age where things like dating and having stellar friends concern him: in fact, these things don't concern him at all. He could feasibly be termed a bit of an asshole, come to that. Rick simply doesn't need or want things that would tie him down--having a job and an apartment lease to keep him in one place is bad enough; some woman or a friend getting bummed over his never being in town? Please. Pass. This isn't to say he isn't personable, of course; in fact, quite the contrary. Rick is incredibly personable, and so it comes as quite a shock when his easy smiles and joking manner don't extend past the conversation he's currently having. He doesn't expect anything of anyone on that front, and doesn't want them to expect it of him either. He is laid back and pleasant, but distant, and it's the rare occasion you'll find him talking about himself.
In fact, Rick takes great pains to keep his personal life completely cut off from anyone he knows. It does, after all, include a highly illegal life of sneaking past intercontinental borders and stealing archeaological treasures. At school, he is known for inexplicably making the female undergrads (and hell, a few of the female professors) sigh contentedly as he passes--inexplicably, because for all intents and purposes, he's simply the fuddy-duddy history professor. No one has ever seen his apartment, and it's doubtful whether he even owns a car; even people in the Pentamerone know little to nothing about him, unless they're willing to do some serious digging that will, more likely than not, end up with Rick and a gun in their face. He enjoys his front of affable distance, and will go to nearly any length to keep it up.
There are layers beneath it, of course. Rick has a complicated, painful relationship with his father that is almost all give and take, varying from his father giving orders to Rick giving him shit at any given time. He doesn't know how to handle his own emotions most of the time, and anytime something escalates beyond vague pleasantries he has a tendency to flail, lash out, and back away quickly. In the same vein, his temper is something not to be trifled with: most accurately described as a boiling kettle, any frustration is likely to set the ticking off, and when it finally comes to a head there is often screaming, confessing, possible violence, and a lot of hurt feelings. He tries to keep it under control, and more often than not will just diffuse it into a frustrated "Ah, come on, will you just lay off," but every now and again it flares, generally when someone keeps needling. Rick is not a fan of needlers. He's not a fan of company of any sort, really (unless, like any man with a functioning penis, he's getting laid), and generally keeps to himself. Holidays he doesn't force himself back to his father's in Connecticut are spent alone, as most nights are, and it's rarer than rare to see him actually hanging out with anyone. He's, for lack of a better term, a lone wolf in friendly sheep's clothing.
Likes: Travelling, fine wine, the smell of dirt after rain, books, old things, Rome, the Catechombs, his apartment, cats, Harry Potter, Batman.
Dislikes: Pipes, fire, spiders, committment, grading papers, swooning women. Snakes.
personal.
Family: Richard Christopher Jones III (father).
History: Rick's history is one of those you can only take with a grain of salt. He was born in Doncaster, England, to Richard Jones III and Emilia Hartley-Jones, who died from pregnancy-related complications six months later. Emilia's death would forever define how Richard and Rick saw each other: his boy would never be fulfilling his own potential, would never be making his mother as proud as she should be; Rick's father would never be more than a distant, touchy man who couldn't care two whits about Rick beyond his being the best in everything. False perceptions, of course, but when the only female presences in the household were Helen the maid and Archer the golden retriever, it became extremely difficult to mesh two dominant, proud, and unyielding male personalities. Rick gave his father trouble for it for years: from starting fights at school to terrorizing the neighbors, Rick was a problem child from the get-go, and more than once did Richard get a call at his office in Sheffield (a prestigious professor of philosophy at the university there, his reputation for unyielding teaching was only matched by his son's reputation for being a bane on his existence) to come pick his injured/caught/fighting son up.
Things remained this way until Rick was twelve, when his father received an offer from Yale University to head up their philosophy department. Though he was loath to leave England, the opportunity was one-in-a-million, and he thus plucked Rick out of secondary school and Doncaster, and shipped everything off to Connecticut. Rick, however, would not remain there long: Richard determined his son ought to have the best sort of education and, preferably, stay out of his hair, and as such, Rick was shipped straight back to Europe not two months after arriving in the U.S. He certainly got the education his father desired, though perhaps not in the most convential--or healthy--way. His childhood antics of roughhousing and troublemaking only became trickier and cleverer as he got older, and he was in the headmaster's office on more than one occasion. Most of his professors knew him by name (that terrible Jones boy), and though he got on with a few of them, many would have happily thrown him out to the wolves and gotten comfortable sleep that night. He was, to put it lightly, a bad seed, and not even bouncing around between three different boarding schools--in three different countries--would quash him. England tossed him out, then Germany, and he only managed to matriculate after several years at a school in Luxembourg, where he fell in cahoots with one of the younger religion professors (who, he is still convinced, is pretty much the only reason he didn't get thrown out of that school). Six years and any number of threatening phone calls from Father later, and he was shipped right back to Connecticut, a certificate of his secondary education in his bored little hands.
He spent 6 months with his father, missing the deadline for university application for that term, both due to procrastination and simply wanting to see that one vein in his father's head pulse. He did manage to start in spring semester, however, entering Yale University on his own merit and (primarily) his father's recommendation. Surprisingly enough, Rick took to university exceedingly well, and much to his father's pleasure, he started to abandon his old teenage habits in favor of knuckling down and getting a proper education. He double-majored in History and Religion, and even managed to achieve his B.A. in 3 short years. His social life suffered, to be sure, but Rick had found a substitute for troublemaking in learning (Knowledge is Power!), and held to it. It was quite possibly the only time he and his father ever got along: this, Richard felt, was where Rick's true potential lied, and Rick was enjoying himself so much he couldn't very well disagree.
But shipping the boy around so much had engendered a sense of wanderlust in him, and after three years of voluntarily staying in one place, he felt the tug to move starting back up again. After yet another fight with Dad, he abandoned their plans for him to start graduate studies and tripped off to New York with a friend from the university, where said friend was going to start his own graduate education. It was not enough to sate him: a year later, he was off again, back to Europe, where he made a short stint in Spain, England, then France, which left him relatively penniless. He made contact with the young professor he'd known in Luxembourg who, thankfully, remembered him fondly enough to lend him his couch until Rick could get back on his feet. They befriended each other better than mentor and mentee, and when the teacher received an invitation to teach at Humbholdt University in Berlin, Rick went with him. After a few months of lolling about in Germany, he entered the same university on his friend's recommendation. The freeform system, much different than the American, appealed to him; and in 7 years of intermingled study and travel, he achieved his Masters in History. His Tale, always present in the back of his mind (he'd received his Compendium shortly after returning to the US from boarding school; and there really wasn't much to his Tale; he adjusted quickly), became more readily apparent as he studied the folklore and history behind it; he's probably more knowledgeable about his Tale than most people at the Pentamerone, which is really just another feather in his cap rather than anything useful. But still.
Just over 30, he started travelling again, acquiring knowledge and artifacts and, after a couple of years, beginning to steal them. He's not entirely sure why, either, but he's pretty convinced it's something about the thrill of the chase. Every artifact gets donated to a museum (often for a hefty reward), and he's had more than one life-threatening scrape due to his less than scrupulous methods of acquirement. Still, he loves it, and it's more than enough to sate his wanderlust. Enough, in fact, that he was tempted to quasi-settle down at 35. He returned to New York to meet, after nearly a decade of little contact, the friend he'd moved to the city with after college, who was now an associate professor at NYU. With his credentials and world experience under his belt, it was too easy for Rick to sidle into an professorial position in the History department--though, in a spurt of filial devotion, he consulted his father first. Unsurprisingly, the visit ended in a fight that led to Rick's resolution to associate with his father as little as possible (he's not even sure what the fight was about at this point, only that he nearly denied even having a father for a month afterwards), and he took the job at NYU just to ensure they would stay states away from each other at all time. He's there presently, and though settling down wasn't as in the cards as he would have liked--he has finangled his schedule to only teach two days a week, and spends the rest of it on some crazyass treasure hunt out of the country--he still retains the position and seems to enjoy it.
physical.
Height: 6'3"
Weight: 200 something or other. Whatever.
Hair: Black-brown and kept very short.
Eyes: Pale blue.
Appearance: Rick is the kind of man who gets more attractive the more time you spend around him--which is fortunate, as he would rather not be noticed on first glance. His skin is rough and ruddy, that strange reddish-brown color English people turn when they spend too much time in the sun; his hair is dark and kept short about his scalp, and his eyes are a lovely shade of pale blue. It sounds perfectly appealing, and he is by no means an unfortunate-looking sort of man. However, he makes an effort to appear less than he is, with a constantly unshaved jawline, slightly ill-fitting suits in last season's colors, penny-loafers, and rumpled jackets that have probably spent too long shoved in a corner of his office. At least, at work. When he's off on some illegal jaunt, it's all beaten jeans and worn leather jackets that smell of rain and earth and hand-rolled cigarettes. There are muddy boots, gun holsters, and the quintessential beaten up hat, sweaty shirts and the swaggering confidence of a 6'3" man who's all muscle and in his element. Why yes; he is damn fine then.
Samples:
social.
Status: Single.
Orientation: Straight, thank you.
Turn Ons: Liveliness. Domesticity. Energy without being overbearing. Being subservient. Not being subservient. Dark hair and pale skin. Long legs. Tits.
Turn Offs: Clingy women. Relationships. Coffee dates. Dating at all. Whores. Mousy women. Other professors.
ooc.
PB: Gerard Butler.
Player: Rian!