Bio
CHARACTER NAME: Nicholas De Lorimier. His birth name is 'Njaka'. He had it changed to the more westerner friendly 'Nicholas' as soon as he was old enough. The only person who still calls him Njaka is his mum.
CHARACTER'S DATE OF BIRTH, AGE: July 10th, 1971. (36)
SHORT PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION:
Nicholas is very tall and very slender. He keeps his naturally curly hair completely shaved down, effectively removing the only obviously African part of his anatomy. This, combined with the green eyes, is deliberately made keep him looking ethnically ambiguous. He likes it that way, as he considers racial politics as a complete waste of time and energy. He's a quite youthful looking 40 year old and could probably almost be considered pretty in an extensively polished and manicured type of way. And, while not completely shallow, he was taught from a very early age on that the outside was every bit just as important as the inside, he's therefore always exquisitely put together; almost nothing touches his body besides bespoke suits and designer threads.
PLAYED BY:
PERSONALITY:
Nicholas comes from a very 'old world' type of family and has been indoctrinated with those values ever since he was born. His view of the world is completely hierarchal, almost to the point of being compartmentalized; whether it comes to things or people. He keeps a completely separate public and private life and the people who surround him have a very precise order of importance. However, how they are classified is where he tends to differ from the standard. Showing his father's progressive streak (the man was all old money and important family name and still decided to fuck off to Africa and marry a nobody, after all), he has very little use for the traditional conception of people who are worthy and people aren't and is quite happy with his own system. Anyone disagreeing will be promptly ignored. So really, he still manages to be a complete, petulant, elitist snot in his own particular way.
Nicholas likes for things to look like they come easy to him. They don't at all, but he likes his aesthetic to reflect effortlessness. In actual fact, Nicholas is a very, very hard worker. He was lucky enough to get a good strategic mind and the green eyes genetically, but very few other things came by him by way of nature. (The most noticeable example is probably his physique. He doesn't keep lean and toned by ways of not eating. He is simply up at six every single morning to work out.)He is ready to put the effort into making things happen for him, however, which is possibly why he's been so successful at such a young age. His years of studies were fraught with sleepless nights, spent revising whichever expert texts he could find to add onto what he'd learnt in class. And while the endless reading and rereading may have seemed excessive, but in the end it paid off; his constant top marks enabled him to have the pick of pretty much any internship he desired.
This was a desirable position. In the obvious way, of course, but also in the way that it was exactly where Nicholas wanted to be. This is where the strategizing kicks in, everything Nicholas does is entirely deliberate, he's always planning ahead and works so hard to achieve whatever he's set his mind to that he is rarely, if ever, caught even needing a backup plan. As such, if there is one thing Nicholas doesn't deal well with at all, it is spontaneity. He knows this, so at least in the business sense he knows to think about possible problems and is usually not too bad at thinking on his feet because he knows the industry so well. However, when dealing with people it can become problematic. The emotional fluctuations of others are clearly not his area of expertise and he would clearly not have to deal with them. However, he does have to work with humans and has a life, and friends (amazingly enough!) outside of the workplace. He sticks with either a blank stare of other or giving a piece of terrible advice and moving along. Most of the people who know him know not to ask for more.
It's a bit of an open secret that he's gay. His boyfriend Lucas is a human rights lawyer, and they met while he lived in New York. They're struggling a bit when it comes to the long distance end of their relationship (even if they do technically live together, they both work on different coasts, and when cases do come up Lucas often finds himself in New York or out of the country for months at a time), but are still going very strong after seven years (however, as is to be expected, he was just -delighted- to hear about the whole abuse of underpaid Chinese workers situation).
If there's one last thing that needs to be mentioned, it's that Nicholas refuses to be put in a box. He dislikes being told what to do. And having to act a certain way because of his sexual orientation or skin colour irks him to no end. So even the ambiguous end is entirely calculated. He just doesn't let it go.
HISTORY:
Most of Nicholas' life has been spent divided amongst the five (inhabitated) continents. He was born in Madagascar to a French father and a Malagasy mother. Saying his mother was a 'nobody' in the classical sense would be a slight exaggeration. She was an important women's rights activist and a lawyer in her own country, as well as having gained international recognition for all her work. But yes, she wasn't French. And even if she was tremendously affluent in her own right, she obviously wasn't from an 'old and well respected (and French, let it be said again)' family, which was more than a slight problem in his grandparents eyes. Nicholas spent his childhood being carted off between his parents from one end of the planet to the other. Amazingly enough, even through all their travelling, they usually managed it so that he was with at least one of them (when they couldn't both be working in the same country) at any given time. So, yes, he saw enough of his parents to have a normal relationship with them. But that also meant he had to change schools, and often continents, every six months to a year or so.
He never complained, though. From a young age already he worked very hard to adapt himself to the changes (most notably the languages, as they don't come that easily to him, and even if he often went to the best international school in whichever country he was in and rarely had to take any classes in any of the local languages his parents insisted that he was able to communicate adequately with people wherever he happened to be). All of this only worked to his advantage, family wealth and connections combined to his ability to adapt and working knowledge of a good few languages meant he had the pick of any of the best schools in the world when it came time for him to go to University. And best schools he chose. He studied macroeconomics and finance at Cambridge and went off to intern and finally work at McKinsey & Co in New York as a market researcher. He did seven years of this before leaving for France to do his MBA at the INSEAD, which he completed successfully. He came back to the US, relocated on the West Coast and a year later he was beginning as VP for Vance Corporation.
As such, he's been enjoying a steady (if significantly shorter than most high placed employees) run at Vance Corporation. And he's quite curious about all of the latest developments concerning the whole China situation. He's actually secretly thrilled to be going to see what's going on himself. And as westernized as he is, the 'second and third world' are his home; he's looking forward to getting out of the resort, walking up to a market stall and trying to remember enough Mandarin to ask for the dodgiest looking piece of food he can find.
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