Application ♛ General Information
OOC Information:
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IC Information:
Name: Erik Lehnsherr
Fandom: X-Men: First Class
Timeline: Mid-Movie
Age: 33
Appearance:
~Erik is on the right~
Due to his years spent on the move and generally Nazi-hunting, Erik is lean and toned; he’s built like a swimmer, his height is 6’1. He’s got pale green eyes, and a somewhat shark-ish smile-- and his hair is usually neatly styled and slicked back, though he’s been known to leave it to grow out a bit in the back.
Abilities-
Strengths:
Erik is a mutant, and his mutation gives him the power to control and manipulate the earth’s magnetic fields. This allows him the manipulation of all types of metal alloys, and even the iron in a person’s bloodstream.
The control over the magnetic fields permits a certain type of levitation, too, however, he has not acquired enough significant training based around this aspect of his ability. It is unclear as to the size and amount of metal that Erik has control over, though in one instance, he was able to lift a Russian submarine clear from the ocean. It is worth mentioning that the ability that Erik has is very much enhanced by the presence of his close friend Charles Xavier-- Charles is able to center him, and to calm him enough to use his power to its fullest extent.
Before he knew Charles, he used the focus that his deeply felt anger allowed him-- which was limiting, in a way. Charles, through his telepathy, was able to help Erik find a focus, in the telepath’s own words “between rage and serenity” where he had full command of his metal-manipulating ability.
Alongside the ability to control metal, Erik is well versed in a certain type of hand-to-hand combat, purely learned out of necessity when facing men he intends to kill-- while he’s untrained, he’s still formidable, and extremely strong.
Weaknesses:
Erik’s greatest weakness is his absolute blind belief that all humanity is essentially the same-- he hates humans, and mistrusts them to the point that he has formed no close personal relationships with them since the death of his family in the concentration camps. It also leads to a sort of Napoleonic god-complex; Erik believes that he alone can save the mutants from human domination, drawing parallels that are often outdated and inapplicable. Stubbornness is also an innate weakness in Erik’s character, he’ll hold fast to a belief even if he has been proven wrong time and time again, and he’ll fight for an ideal regardless of the negative moral implications of it.
Another weakness would be Charles Xavier. While his friend does often challenge his views and ideals, he’s grown extraordinarily close to the man, and owes him a large degree of his sanity and continued existence. If Charles were threatened in any way, or in danger of some kind, Erik would return to his side instantaneously-- even if it were to his own detriment.
Personality:
Erik has an extremely passionate temperament, he’s fiery, and in his own way, he’s idealistic. There are equal amounts of determination and fatalism in him; though at heart he will always be the cynic that Sebastian Shaw made him; the experiments and the early death of his family created a creature that was bend on causing the destruction of Shaw, and that has been his sole aim for years.
Erik does not make close personal connections to people. He is extremely private, and protective of that privacy; as someone who lived his life between hotel rooms and missions, he has had very few romantic attachments, and more often than not they were only a means of manipulation of the people he became involved with. The result of his stay in the concentration camps was a defined sense of self-reliance, and he has stuck by this principle, sure that he cannot trust another soul, not even himself, sometimes. It leads him to remain separate from humanity in a way that permits him to view it with a removed scepticism.
He is an eloquent man, understanding the power of words and of the strength of a cause-- this is what lead him to create his ideal of a separate mutant society from the human race-- in this way, Erik is very similar to the character Kurtz, of the classical novel Heart of Darkness; he has great vision and extraordinary passion, but his moral grounding is shaky at best, so those ideals are followed down to their darkest reaches, becoming warped and steeped in arrogance on the way. He is not a moral man, and has killed freely and without much conscience. Human life means very little to him, particularly in the face of a goal-- he will not hesitate to take lives if it permits him to accomplish what he sets out to accomplish.
Despite his disposition towards seriousness, Erik is not entirely gloomy and dour. He can be charming too, because he has a deep understanding of people-- learned through the years of being an observant outsider of societies around Europe-- Erik is manipulative, and will act a certain way in order to cause people to like and to trust him. There is a strong sense of charisma in him, a magnetism that oddly mirrors the ability that he has. He’s a thoroughly modern man (of the 1960’s, of course), and he maintains a gentlemanly approach with women; he’d open a door, or pull out a chair quite happily, as well as take a turn around a dance hall. He’s been known to do the twist, though that’s only when coupled with very specific individuals and a considerable amount of scotch. There is also a sense of humour there, but it tends more towards being sardonic, and tinged with the hint of darkly comedic outlook.
When he allows himself the time off to relax, he can be casual and easy going, though that’s usually tempered by a needling sense of work ethic and restlessness. Most upbeat evenings are followed by his characteristic brooding, because he rarely allows himself to be entirely happy without sinking back into his usual patterns of mulling over how he is going to destroy Shaw. Charles can sometimes draw him out of it, with enough coaxing, though he inevitably will seek solitude at some stage.
In his introspectiveness, Erik can recognize in himself a certain kind of darkness; he’s not blind to his own moral failings, but he is defensive of them; though this awareness leads him to isolate himself from the affection of people. Charles is the exception here, because with telepathy, he has seen the majority of Erik’s mentality and his psychological structuring-- then looks past that, still finding something worthy in the man himself.
To the few people that he allows to finally grow close to him, Erik is undyingly faithful and loyal. In the context of his storyline, he and Charles separate due to ideological clashes. While their parting is violent, over the years following it, Erik still remains on hand to defend the school that Charles establishes-- he may be embittered by this divide, but the obsession with separatism and his Brotherhood of mutants is put aside in order to provide his oldest and closest friend with assistance.
History:
Erik Lehnsherr was born to a middle-class German/Jewish family in the late 1920's. His family was captured, and then separated from him in the concentration camps, and the camp’s doctor, Sebastian Shaw; a Mengele-like scientist figure, shot his mother in an effort to evoke a response from his latent powers. Shaw, having discovered that Erik had mutant abilities, then used him as a test subject-- attempting to discover more about mutations. Erik was subject to various terrible experimentations, and for years he was a prisoner at Shaw’s beck and call; surviving only from his strong sense of will, and desire for vengeance.
Erik was eventually freed from Auschwitz, subsequently attempting to track down and destroy Shaw. He traveled Europe in search of the man, slowly teaching himself how to exist in the adult world, and still dealing with the extreme emotional damage after his years in the camps. In this canon, and because it was left unspecified in the film, Erik traveled as far as Israel, and Jerusalem, in search of some kind of grounding and healing. Having traveled and seen such an amount of the world, Erik also completed degrees in mechanical engineering and mechanics, and he read vastly, with a certain interest in modernism, and post-modernism literature. The isolation when he was a prisoner in Auschwitz caused a certain kind of introspectiveness to arise, and his search for Shaw was mirrored in his search for knowledge; to gain some sort of understanding of the powers that he possessed.
After nearly dying in an attempt to apprehend Shaw on his yacht, he was found by Charles Xavier, who saw in him an equal and a friend. Erik joined Charles in trying to gather mutants, to teach them how to use and control their powers. This eventually lead to another confrontation with Shaw, this time at the peak of the Cuban Missile Crisis, on the beach in Cuba. Though the attack was thwarted, and the Crisis averted, the very fact that the humans wound up targeting the mutants instead of each other caused Erik to take action, separating from Charles once and for all.
In the context of the game, Erik, Charles and the rest of their rag-tag team of mutant teenagers and young adults, were captured due to their mutations.
Roleplay Sample - Log:
Erik and Alex had been working in the formal terrace garden since the early morning; putting in a series of tall plastic poles around which Sean would soon be learning to steer himself while in flight. Erik had his shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows, and with a shovel in one hand he pushed his hair back with the other-- stepping away for a moment to survey the arrangement with a critical eye, a dusting of sand just above his cheekbone from digging out the holes.
He turned his head to glance up at the house, and just caught sight of Charles’ figure on the front path-- the rain had come up quickly, and the light mist was speedily turning towards a thunderstorm. Erik put aside the shovel, dismissing Alex with a nod, and began the long walk up to the house; jacket slung over his shoulder while he navigated the topiary-shaped hedges and picked his way across the rain-wet expanse of lawn, circumventing the fountain, and vaulting effortlessly over the balustrade.
“Charles--“ He called out, squinting upwards at the graying sky as he walked, and it started to pour in earnest, obscuring the grounds with a hazy fog of rainwater. Erik smiled, skipping the first two steps of the upper terrace, and crossing to the front path while swinging his jacket off of his shoulder-- he reached the other man, holding the jacket above both their heads with a brilliant flash of teeth; all the while water dripped from his hair onto Charles’ sweater and shoes.
“What brings you out here, then?” His sidelong glance was playful, the collar of his shirt jauntily misshapen and the entire ensemble was vaguely muddied, a grass-stain on the shoulder. For a moment the lopsided smile on his face lingered, even after he’d stopped speaking, and the glance he aimed at Charles was entirely affectionate, despite it being disguised soon after.
There was a loud clap of thunder from above them, and the sky lit up for a second. Erik didn’t seem too inclined to move. He liked the rain, had liked it since he was a child-- there was nostalgia in it, because before everything-- the camps, Shaw-- he remembered evenings spent by the fire with his mother and father, water gusting against the windows of their home. And he’d never forget the winter in the camp, where it had poured down on him while he was dragged from his parents. It had been raining the night he’d been found by Charles too though, into the ocean, and on the boat. The associations were mixed.
“Aren’t you cold? I don’t want you sick on my account, let’s get back inside.”
He walked them up the path, towards the cover of the front door, casually letting his jacket drop down onto the other’s shoulders. Erik leaned a shoulder back against the stone entrance, seemingly unaffected by the cold, and eyed the downpour, “It doesn’t look like Sean’s going to be practicing anytime soon.”
Roleplay Sample - Journal:
It’s been a week in this place since we were captured, the humans that Charles was so eager to trust-- to rely on have turned on us as I had anticipated they would, and here we sit, in cells as if we are animals; to be experimented on, to be picked apart.
Just like-- with Shaw. It’s uncanny, it’s cruel that Charles should be subject to his now. I would gladly put myself in his place a hundred times over in order to prevent it; he is not like me, he is not-- he has not lived through something like this, and does not understand what it is to be treated as inferior, as sub-human.
I-- should have had the power to stop them from taking us, if I had concentrated, perhaps listened more closely to his idiot spiel about rage versus serenity-- but there’s nothing that can be done now, and we’re damned to try to survive here. The children should be alright back at the mansion, Raven will step up and protect them, she’s a smart girl, that sister of his.
There is just-- I can’t allow what happened to me, those years back, to happen to Charles. That idealism, regardless of how utterly insufferable it is, and how much it pains me to admit-- is a large part of what makes him the good man that he is, and to lose that-- God, to lose that would be profoundly terrible.
This game includes horrible mental and physical torture of your character. After reading the rules/faq for clarification, how do you expect your character to handle this and continue to function?
Erik would manage. He learned how to cope and take care of himself while in situations of extreme pain and stress, thanks mainly to his time in the concentration camps. He would probably turn a lot harsher, under the circumstances, and would undoubtedly suffer from the similarity to his former life in the camps. That would possibly cause a degree of regression and force him to confront his fears and memories from that time. However, having Charles along with him (his established Charles, butwedonot has app'd here too) would cause him to take responsibility for the telepath’s wellbeing, shift the focus off his personal pain. He would try to see to it that Charles is protected, as much as he can, and would attempt to keep him comforted and distracted from their circumstances.