000: Character Information
OOC Information
Name: Jess
LJ: amerou
E-Mail: jess@lostmysanity.net
IM: Amerou Howling
Characters played at EGU: N/A
Dropped any?: N/A
Character Information
Name: Erica McElraft
Age: 28
Gender: Female
Sexuality: Most likely straight.... but who has time for that?
Occupation: Head Librarian
Tutor times: See Library Hours, excepting teatime.
Residence: Although she has a ruthlessly organized little apartment at Shady Pines, more often than not lives out of her office, especially during times of high volume of study.
Appearance: Most people expect the ringleader of the most feared crew of librarians in Evergrove to be a tall, imposing, stern older woman, perhaps a Catholic nun in a previous life. Instead what they get is a petite girl in her late twenties, perhaps 5'3" in stocking feet, with bright blonde hair cut into a cute pixie, dark cinnamon eyes, a paper-white complexion and a winning smile (or intimidating scowl) that tries to make up for her complete lack of curves. In the kingdom that is her library, she is almost always seen in tailored grey skirt-suits and black stiletto heels, her nametag clearly visible at a breast pocket, sometimes with a pair of red reading glasses perched on her nose. Off the clock, she tends to dress much more like a student than a professional, and it is not uncommon for her to be seen sitting in at Coffee Row or 13 in jeans and a tank top, reading, typing on her laptop (a blue and white number with a stylized swan embellishing the case), or grading the odd essay from those who choose to tutor with her.
Personality: Books are sacred; understand this core precept, and you can begin to understand Erica. If books were a religion, she would be high priestess. Nothing gets under her skin faster than someone who dogears their books, defaces the text with naughty words, puts things out of order in the Reserved Books section, or (Heaven forbid) writes snarky little comments in the margins. Practically every book that has passed through Evergrove's immense library has at some point been in her hands, under her personal attention. Though she hasn't quite memorized the entire contents of the building (yet!) she is intimately familiar with what goes where and why, and could probably rattle off the Dewey Decimal for most of her favourite volumes. Obsessive much? Just a little! But as they say, genius needs a focus, and Erica is not your run-of-the-mill librarian. Within the confines of her library, she is a force to be reckoned with, a natural disaster descending upon the hapless coastline for those who earn her wrath, and just the teensiest bit high strung.
If you can catch her on a good day, or outside of her library, Erica seems like an entirely different person. The more whimsical side of her is actually rather sweet and retiring, with a tendency to sit in the back and observe any goings-on with interest, but no impetus to pry or stick her nose where it doesn't belong - she is often much too absorbed in her own world to be possibly offending someone by poking herself into a stranger's business uninvited! If someone makes the overtures, however, she is only too happy to converse and try to find common ground, though her initial distance is sometimes mistaken for indifference or aloofness. With what few friends she has, she is warm, loyal and a sharp wit, with a love of debate-discussion-friendly argument and goofy sentiments. The quickest way to her heart is a gift certificate to a book store. For those who know her 'secret identity' as Rose Cherry, she is only too happy to sign loopy, elegant autographs and drop hints about the plotline of her next novel, but she does not seek to bring them up herself in the course of conversation.
In many things, Erica has approximately the attention span of a goldfish, and would have made a wonderful engineer were it not for her damnable lack of absent-mindedness; instead, her inability to focus generally results from when something, or someone, fails to hold her interest and attention. She likes shiny, pretty things, and as a result she tends to write in glitter pens, especially on essays or papers she is asked to grade, often embellishing with comments like "How did you come to this conclusion? Oh wait! BRILLIANT!" and "Nice calculator you have there!" She has a bit of a sweet tooth, always carries peppermints in her pockets, and takes two sugars with her tea, either hot or cold; it is an unwise idea to disturb her with work-related business buring her teatime, and it is the only time of the week that she refuses to tutor or answer calls.
History: Erica Valerie McElraft was born to an upper middle class family as the youngest child and only daughter, and from her (excessively destructive) early childhood onward, her family knew there was something.... um, special about her. Whether it was painting the white couch with chocolate syrup at 6 in the morning or managing to unlock the front door to go make mud-castles out in the yard at midnight, Erica's will could not be defied, only delayed or worked around. Nothing entertained her for very long; all the puzzles her family threw at her she solved only too quickly and lost interest in, and more complex toys were tinkered with and soon taken apart by her inquisitive young hands. By the time she was six, her parents had installed latches at the tops of all the doors and had begun locking up all the chairs at night, to prevent her escaping into the street in search of something to do. Exasperated with this horrible child, her mother turned to one of her school friends, a Psychology graduate of Evergrove specializing in pediatrics, and handed Erica over to her for the weekend. When the child was returned to the McElrafts, she was a much quieter, happier young girl, more cooperative and willing to listen.
Her family, amazed (and somewhat relieved) by this metamorphosis, asked Dr. Kell what it was that she had done to elicit such a reaction from her, and Dr. Kell only shrugged and said, "I taught her to read."
It would be a critical turning point in Erica's life. Once she discovered that the books she had so wantonly destroyed had uses other than as confetti, she began devouring all the words within reach, working her way through her dad's bookshelf within a few weeks (and prevented from her mom's only by the fact that she was "not old enough to read that kind of fiction.") That minor roadblock aside, from then on it was certain that Erica had found her passion early in life. At ten she gave up on fiction and began reading entire textbooks; by twelve she had worked her way to a college-grade level of comprehension, and finally her mother gave up on homeschooling and enrolled her in a local middle school. When began complaining to the teacher about how the problems were too easy, she was bumped up into the Gifted & Talented program and flourished there for as long as the program could challenge her. Unfortunately, when she was set to graduate high school at the tender age of fifteen, the effectiveness of the program began to drop off sharply as her intelligence outstripped that of her teachers. The leadup to graduation was the longest and most boring year of her life, and it was during this time that she began to dabble in writing books as well as reading them. By the time she had her diploma and wrote her application to Evergrove (with Dr. Kell's full support and mentoring) she had finished her first book, and sent it off to an array of publishers just as she was entering the first semester of her happy college years. (Although nothing ever came of that first novel, it was a milestone in her life that she took great care in remembering, and even now retains the original manuscript and every single denial letter, likely for blackmail purposes.)
College was, for Erica, a playground of earthly delights, especially at such an exceptional campus as Evergrove. Although she double-majored in English and Literature, she happily dabbled in other subjects, such as anthropology, foreign languages, art, even chemistry. About the only thing her intellectual appetite did not cover were the higher maths; she took Statistics and a calculus or two and got the damn requirements over with, so that she could focus on what made her happy to study. The years flew by, and when Erica emerged from Evergrove at 21 with two Masters in her chosen subjects, it seemed like she was on the fast track to success, and nothing could stop her....
....well, nothing except herself. Although her resume was impeccable and her knowledge infallible, Erica hopped from job to job, never quite finding that right place to challenge her and keep her mind active. She served a stint as a journalist, then as an editor and chief editor at three separate publications, then a reporter; when she realized that the news program was more interested in how high her heels were rather than her IQ, she quit on the spot, which happened to be on air, live at the scene of a terrible Ferris wheel accident at the county fair. From there she nailed a job as Public Relations VP at a publishing company, only to find that the quality of the fiction it churned out took a backseat to the business end, and Erica's time consisted mainly of smoothing ruffled feathers between authors and media and taking questions on what hot actor was to be featured on the next trashy romance cover. The story is still told at Daggerdelve Publishing of how she stood up in a meeting one day in front of the comapny president, shouted "It's all rubbish! All of it!", took off her pumps and stormed out without a further word.
Erica then sequestered herself in her little apartment for almost a month, writing nonstop, until she had come up with what she called "a smut novel worth reading" and pitched her second book to Daggerdelve's main rival, Nomenclature. This would turn out to be the first of a wildly popular romance saga penned under the name Rose Cherry, a success which is both Erica's pride and bane. After a handful of books made their way into the market, she needn't worry about her finances for the rest of her life; though she resisted offers made to cinemize her books, the paperbacks alone secured her future. With thus no doors closed to her and the freedom to go wherever and do whatever she wanted, Erica chose....
....to apply for the Head Librarian position at Evergrove.
Her staff don't quite get that choice either, but there you go. Popular opinion holds that she only wanted to be among her own kind, and thus migrated back to the land of her birth as a learned adult, but whatever the real reason, Erica McElraft isn't saying it.
Samples
Third Person: "You came back for me," he smiled wanly up at her, one crystal-blue eye catching the light and holding it like a gemstone, the other forever lost beneath the flow of blood from his brow. Tears rained from her cheeks to gently spatter his face, touchstones of warmth amidst the cold; she fought for level tones, pressed her scarlet-stained hands harder to his would, as if her very will could hold back the fading tide of his life.
"Of course I came back for you," said La'ni, struggling and failing to keep her voice from cracking at the end. "I'll always come back for you, didn't I tell you that?" She sniffed hard and pretended the tears did not exist, that the battlefield did not exist, that the wetness on her hands and his frozen smile were all part of some great game, some joke that Fate played upon them. His lashes fell, black as night against his pale cheeks, and she thought she the strained exhalation of his breath might have once been the ghost of his laughter. Damned Gerrard, always laughing, laughing in the face of his death!
"Ah, La'ni, my love," he sighed, and his callussed hand covered her smaller ones where they pressed at his deathblow, "you have to let me go."
She paused then in the frenetic action of her typing, frowning over her reading glasses at her laptop's screen, and scrolled upwards to reread what she had just wrote. It was in-character, yes, it was conducive to the plot and appropriately sappy to appease the readers, but it lacked.... something. What was it? What word did she seek?
Oomph, she noted mentally, and though she hated to use such an unprecise term, there was nothing else for it. Erica McElraft, AKA Cherry Rose, author of countless books that were notable for their prose, plot and vividly graphic sex scenes, leaned back in her chair and stretched her arms, way, waaay over her head, one palm on the opposite elbow. When her arms came back down, she plucked a pencil from the table and used it to tap her lips, staring at the laptop as if it held the answers to all the questions ever asked within.
"Maybe too sappy...?" she wondered aloud, musing without realizing she wasn't alone in Coffee Row; she poked at the paragraph for a few more minutes, but in the end she sighed, saved it as-is, and shut the laptop, brushing the stylized swan-design's wings unconciously with her fingertips as she sought the power button. It was in this idle activity that her eyes lit upon a discarded volume, left forlorn upon the floor below a neighboring table. Immediately her figurative hackles rose, and before she could stop herself she had made a beeline to the table and was crawling beneath it, rescuing the poor book from a dirty, dusty oblivion. She cradled it to her chest as she brought it back into the light, lovingly smoothed the wrinkled cover, and could have wept when she saw the title: The Wild Swans At Coole, by Yeats.
Instead of weeping, her eyes narrowed, and she swept the little coffee shop with her vision, holding up the book as if it were the Bible, or a bomb, or both.
"Who does this belong to?? This is a library book!!"
First Person:
[Private]
Shopping list: Mini fridge, sodas, video camera to catch the little bastard that keeps sneaking in and reading my first edition of Pride and Prejudice when I'm not in the office.
I had another one stumble into my office today and give me a copy of Twilight, stammer something that sounded suspiciously like a confession, and promptly turn around and run. Mum calls them 'puppies', the young ones with their cute but inconvenient little crushes, following you around, giving you heartfelt but absurd presents. I hate to break their hearts, but I'm going to have to start discouraging them - I'm already knee-high in Stephanie Meyers. Do none of them have access to Anne Rice? Or even Laurell K, for that matter?
[/Private]
General Memorandum;
- Request for a library cat/college mascot has been denied yet again. Any further requests/petitions can be directed to the Dean. I would appreciate an immediate ceasement of name suggestions dropped in my inbox, as well as adorable pictures of what have been tentatively identified as lolcat strays. Your cooperation in this matter will be appreciated.