OOC || Erik
ERIK
the phantom
Erik, better known as the Phantom of the Opera, is a very human man who is not characterized by the freakish physical deformity that he is careful to keep hidden underneath his mask, but by his desire to fit into society and be like everyone else. It is this overwhelming desire, born from the fear and loathing that surrounds him due to his appearance, that drives him to do everything that he does, whether he is putting on shows to please spectators, building horrific chambers for sultans and shahs, threatening the managers of the Opera House for money, or basically doing everything that he did for Christine. He loves and hates, laughs and cries, creates and destroys all because of this desire to fit in, a desire to be cared about because of who he is and not what he appears to be. He is, as he calls himself, a “loathsome gargoyle, who burns in hell, but secretly yearns for heaven”, a “repulsive carcass, who seems a beast, but secretly dreams of beauty”, and wishes for someone to “find the man behind the monster”.
For he is a monster, no matter what anyone may say, there is no denying that fact. He “kills without a thought” and has no qualms blackmailing and terrorizing others to get what he wants. And while it is true that he turned into a monster because the world’s rejection and hatred of him drove him beyond the pale of humanity, because the unceasing disgust and cruelty that met him at every turn made him believe that he had long since been released of having any duty towards the human race, that only makes him a monster that is to be pitied, not any less of one.
But he is not an unredeemable one, for he can be quite loyal to and protective of those he feels some attachment to so long as they do not betray him, almost a benefactor if one doesn’t pay close attention to his actions in the shadows. And while he can be selfish, obsessive and demanding in his love, he is also capable of immensely selfless love if he believes himself to be truly accepted. For despite all his ruthlessness, he is rather like a child sometimes, one that hasn’t quite learned how to behave and act with the world because there has been no one there to guide him. All he has is his genius and his music, eventually using the former to build himself an underground sanctuary when he tired of trying to be extraordinary despite his appearance, and losing himself in the latter, using it to express every emotion he feels because he simply does not know how to express himself like other, ordinary people.
He seeks to be ordinary, but he has never had the chance to learn how to be so, and his intellect and talents make him unordinary, even without his monstrous face and that distinctive mask. And he is not unaware of his talents, so even while searching for what he so desperately wants, he still has that showman in him and cannot resist showing off (usually by playing tricks). He becomes pleased when he is praised or given a chance to show off the ingenuity of his mind and his many talents, much like the child that he can be, but can quickly turn jealous or upset when things do not go his way, even going so far as to throw rather… distinctive tantrums. These tantrums are usually the reason behind the murders he commits, how he justifies them to himself, for if his victim had not insisted on getting in his way or if only they had given him what he wanted, he wouldn’t have had to kill him or her. He feels regret, yes, but not enough to refrain from committing another murder should another obstacle need to be removed.
Yet even in the face of all this, knowing full well what and who he is, Erik still believes that maybe there is someone out there who can love and accept him, that he can turn into one of the most virtuous, ordinary man in the world if only he is loved for himself. He chases after it desperately, frenziedly, because he believes it to be his only shot at redemption and a happy life, because despite the complexity of his character, he can be summed up with a couple simple sentences:
“He asked only to be ‘some one’ like everybody else. But he was too ugly! And he had to hide his genius or use it to play tricks with, when with an ordinary face, he would have been one of the most distinguished of mankind! He had a heart that could have held the empire of the world; and in the end he had to content himself with a cellar.”
BACKGROUND
the dark seducer
It is said that Erik was born in a small town near Rouen, to a master-mason father and a mother who was frightened by the very sight of her deformed son. His parents were so horrified and terrified by the corpse-like deformation of his face that his father supposedly refused to ever see him, and so as to cover his monstrous features from both her eyes and the eyes of the world, his mother presented him with his very first mask. That mask was, in Erik’s words, his ‘first unfeeling scrap of clothing’, a constant that would follow him throughout the rest of his life, along with the fear and loathing that his parents exhibited to him. ‘Abnormality’ was a phrase that some would use to describe him if they were feeling particularly generous that day, ‘freak’ and ‘monster’ were much more common, others went so far as to call him ‘Devil’s child’ for one can easily guess that many of them thought that his disfigurement was due to the influence of the devil himself.
Disgust and hatred surrounded the young boy and eventually drove him to run away from that house and town, joining up with fairs where showmen would exhibit him as a ‘living corpse’. Crossing the whole of Europe in this fashion, Erik traveled among the gypsies, the foremost in art and magic at the time, and completed his strange education as an artist and magician. At some point he seemed to have disappeared, that period of his life shrouded in obscurity until he was seen again at the fair of Nijni-Novgorod. There, he displayed himself in all his hideous glory, his voice already sounding like nothing anyone had ever heard on earth. Tales of his singing, combined with the extraordinary ventriloquism and legerdemain that he displayed, were carried all the way back to Asia by the trade caravans, even reaching the ears of a bored little sultana of Mazenderan. She demanded his presence, and the Daroga of Mazenderan (later also known as the Persian) brought Erik back to Persia.
In that time known as the ‘rosy hours of Mazenderan’, Erik’s will was law, and he was guilty of many horrors, being described by the Persian as seeming to not know the difference between good and evil. There, the genius scholar, inventor, architect, torturer and murderer continued to add to his already well-known reputation, earning the nickname ‘trapdoor lover’ in addition to demonstrating his prowess with the Punjab lasso, transforming innocent buildings into houses where everything said inside it could be overheard, creating torture-chambers, participating in a number of political assassinations and building a palace for the Shah within which he could move about unseen and disappear without anyone knowing how. Not wanting anyone else to know the secrets of the palace, the Shah ordered Erik to be executed, but the Persian showed compassion to the man and helped him escape so as to avoid losing his head.
From there, Erik drifted to Asia Minor, then Constantinople where he offered his services to the Sultan, building famous trap-doors, secret chambers and mysterious strong boxes for him, along with automata of the Sultan himself. However, it wasn’t in Constantinople that Erik was to make his home, for he soon came to be viewed as knowing too much and was forced to flee for his life again. Grown tired of this adventurous, formidable and monstrous life, Erik found himself in Paris and became an ordinary contractor, building ordinary houses out of ordinary materials, eventually becoming one of the chief contractors under the architect of the Paris Opera House. There, in the cellars of the enormous playhouse, he constructed a home for himself, creating a dwelling far from the surface of the earth where he could hide the monstrosity that he was.
But the house by the underground lake wasn’t the only place that Erik contented himself with-the whole Opera House became his playground. He built and familiarized himself with all the trapdoors, including many that no one but him knew about, fashioned many hiding places for himself (including a hollowed column in Box 5), created passageways between his underground domain and the upper world, secretly carrying on construction even when work on the Opera House was officially suspended during the Franco-Prussian war, the siege of Paris and the Paris Commune. No one knew the Opera Populaire better than he did, so between that and his trickster and showman nature, it came as no surprise when he established a new reputation for himself as the ‘Opera Ghost’ or the ‘Phantom of the Opera’. These names were whispered throughout the many levels of the theater, occasionally accompanied by a small, uncomfortable, slightly frightened smile as people tried to dismiss him as a mere figment of the imagination, but for the main players of the theater, he was very real.
To the reigning diva, Carlotta Giudicelli, he was the menacing presence who tried to get her replaced by his protégée, Christine Daaé, and ruined her career when she refused by causing her to quite literally croak like a toad in the middle of a performance. To the managers who were forced to place Box 5 at his disposal for every performance and pay twenty thousand francs to him each month, he was the threatening ‘O. G.’ who demanded that they allow Christine to sing the lead role instead of Carlotta, the one who nearly ruined them by killing a stage hand and causing the chandelier to fall into the audience in the middle of a performance. To Madame Giry, who had once seen him locked up as an exhibit in a traveling fair and may perhaps have helped him escape, he was the mysterious benefactor for whom she would deliver letters even as she and her daughter, Meg, knew well to fear him and keep his secrets. To Raoul, the Vicomte de Chagny, he was the dark seducer who stood between him and Christine, the angel of death who threatened his life. To Christine, the girl who he helped to find her voice again, he was the Angel of Music who lifted her to the highest levels of ecstasy with his music, the monstrous Phantom who lived beneath the Opera House and loved her with all of his distorted heart and soul, and the fallen idol that she pitied and respected, hated and loved.
And it is Christine that Erik loves and longs for, Christine who makes his song take flight, Christine whose love can redeem and heal him, Christine who is the one that can transform him from a hellish beast to an everyday man. In his pursuit of her, he is not afraid to threaten, blackmail and kill, only taking a break to complete his masterpiece, Don Juan Triumphant. It is after he finishes and presents the piece to the managers at the Masquerade that he is brought to Adstringendum, right before the premiere of his life’s work, as he is preparing to kidnap Christine from under the nose of Raoul who is planning on catching and killing him.
PROFILE
the opera ghost
SERIES The Phantom of the Opera
NAME Erik
ALSO KNOWN AS The Phantom of the Opera, The Opera Ghost, The Trapdoor Lover, The Angel of Music
DATE OF BIRTH Unknown
AGE Early 30s
HEIGHT 6'2"
OCCUPATION Musician, Architect, Genius
TIMELINE
Right before the premiere of Don Juan Triumphant, as he is setting up his preparations for Christine's kidnapping.
RESIDENCE
Not yet available.
PRECIOUS BELONGINGS
His masks, the Punjab lasso and his sword.
ABILITIES
the angel of music
MUSICIAN AND SINGER
Music is Erik’s first and foremost passion, something that he naturally has a talent for. His voice can be “as loud as thunder or as soft as angels’ voices” at will, and is described as being “as beautiful as the voice of an angel”. His singing is unearthly, beautiful, soft, captivating, seemingly capable of mesmerizing listeners as even Raoul declared that he had never in his life “heard anything more absolutely and heroically sweet, more gloriously suggestive, more delicate, more powerful, in short, more irresistibly triumphant.” It is so charming that Raoul felt “deprived of all his will and all his energy and almost all his lucidity.” In addition to singing, Erik also plays the organ, the piano and the violin, playing them so beautifully that a piece he played was described as “the most perfect music”. It is also quite possible that he is familiar with several other instruments as well, considering his criticism of some instrumentalists and his years with the gypsies. Finally, Erik is also a composer, writing his own intoxicating music which is capable of expressing every emotion and every suffering of which mankind is capable.
INVENTOR AND ARCHITECT
As already mentioned, Erik is a genius inventor and architect, possessing a miraculous ingenuity that allows him to come up with extraordinarily unoriginal ideas. He uses hollow bricks and other unordinary materials in order to build structures that allow his voice to travel to specific rooms, making it seem like he is within the very walls themselves. Houses can be transformed from innocent buildings into ones where even the softest of whispers can be heard, and where people can disappear and reappear in the blink of an eye through judicious use of trapdoors and other mechanisms. He uses springs and counterbalances to create secret entrances and exits, capable of making a mirror seem to lengthen before one seemingly walks right through it without realizing how such a thing happened. Twisted, yet highly inventive torture chambers can also be credited to him, along with secret chambers, mysterious strong boxes and even automata that look and act exactly like a real person.
VENTRILOQUIST AND MAGICIAN
Given his inventiveness and the twisted ingenuity of his mind, it should come as no surprise that Erik is a master magician, especially not when one considers the fact that he spend much of his childhood and youth traveling among the gypsies who were the foremost in the arts and magic at the time. His slight of hands were awe-inspiring enough to cause word to travel all the way from Europe to Asia along the trade caravans and cause a sultana to summon him to entertain her. And as demonstrated by his appearing and disappearing acts, not to mention his spiriting away of Christine, he is a master illusionist who seems to particularly enjoy using mirrors. In addition, he is also the “finest ventriloquist in the world” (at least, in his time), capable of throwing his voice so that it sounds like it is coming from wherever he wants it to, even able to make Carlotta think that the famous toad croak came from her own throat. He can also imitate the sounds of such animals as the lion, the leopard and the tsetse fly by using certain materials.
TORTURER AND MURDERER
Perhaps two of the most well-known details about Erik, aside from his music, are the torture chamber and his Punjab lasso. The torture chamber, a hexagonal room covered from floor to ceiling with mirrors capable of creating maddening illusions, is an original design and invention of Erik’s-one which can, and has, driven victims mad enough to hang themselves while the torturers look in on them from an invisible window up above. And this is just one torture, perhaps Erik’s crowning achievement in this area, but most probably not his only one. Then we have the Punjab lasso, the Phantom’s weapon of choice that demonstrates his incredible accuracy and skill in the art of strangulation. With just the rope made out of catgut, Erik is not only capable of killing without being seen, but he has also demonstrated the ability to fell even trained warriors armed with pikes and swords. Additionally, he has shown a familiarity with narcotics and explosives.
SAMPLES
the trapdoor lover
[JOURNAL || FIRST PERSON]
[Text --> Video --> Voice]
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[It would seem that someone’s found the PCD but isn’t quite familiar with it if the keysmashing is anything to go by. It stops soon enough though, becoming something more… comprehensible, as if whoever is on the other side is learning how the keys work. Another press of the button switches it over to video where there’s a brief flash of white, not enough to get a look at who it is before the feed is quickly switched over to voice. And the voice that eventually comes on is male and distinctly… beautiful, even if it is slightly commanding.]
Forgive me for troubling you, mademoiselles, messieurs, but perhaps someone could direct me back to Paris? I do not mean to be rude, but as delightful as your doubt keen senses may find this city, mine would rather prefer to be assaulted by that which they are familiar with, especially when there are still preparations to be made for a memorable show.
That is not to say, however, that I do not enjoy your doubtfully charming hospitality, but if you wish for us to live in peace, you must not begin by kidnapping and holding me captive.
[LOG || THIRD PERSON]
The nib of his quill traveled across the parchment quickly, a trail of red, red notes sprawling across the page as he worked feverishly, his long pale fingers long since stained with the ink that he so favored while candles burned around him, illuminating the room. He seemed to alternate between writing and playing, whirling between the desk and the organ next to it, his eyes glowing yellow in the dim light, wild with passion as his song flowed out from his fingertips and thundered around him. No food or drink was in sight, not even the remains of any repast, and the bed behind him was unslept in, for Erik lost himself in his music when he worked, needing no other form of sustenance aside from that which made his very soul sing.
And with music like that, with notes that seemed to beckon and call as they danced and swirled around him, with notes that rose and fell so sweetly and yet so painfully at the same time, who needed such earthly things as food, drink and rest? No, those were for mere mortals, mortals who did not know the scorching beauty of his dark song, who had yet to hear the musical cries of laughter and tears, of joy and sorrow, of acceptance and rejection, of happiness and sadness, of love and hatred. For his music of the night was a delirium that burned, but not with the fire of heaven.
CREDITS
the creators
CANON © Gaston Leroux & Andrew Lloyd Webber
ACTOR Gerard Butler
MUN wintaer
PROFILE CODE palebird