Illustrated Bandwagon Ho! *
The Boy: Xander LaVelle Used-To-Be-Harris Carson, alumnus
Xander is a normal human with no special powers, but he's spent years fighting evil supernatural creatures as part of a team, both at home and in Fandom. He's 28 (give or take 75 years, thx Weeping Angels), stupid-in-love with bridge_carson, BFF's with Willow Rosenberg (willbedone) and generally a laid-back, jokey kind of guy unless you're evil or mess with his People. He's also missing an eye; he wears a patch and is perfectly comfortable with pirate jokes of all colors. Not so comfortable with the prosthetic eye behind said patch, so not a lot of people know it's there. He also has a tattoo. That precisely three people have seen.
He's a Class of 2006 FH alumnus from the same beat-you-over-the-head-with-7-seasons canon as Buffy. He knows a Buffy (several, in fact), but not this one, and though he's as close to FH!Willow and Dawn as he is to his homegrown versions, he doesn't share a timeline with any of them. Xander was shipped to Fandom just before the end of BtVS Season 3 as part of a plan to get all the Sunnydale students out of town and avoid the canonical graduation battle.
He spent a year in Fandom, met a lot of new friends and new versions of old friends, fell in love with a boy-type-person, went home for college, and got stuck in a slightly-modified version of his canon timeline. Oops. After six years in his time and five months from Fandom's POV, he found his way back to Fandom while looking for Melaka Fray (cantjossme) and became a townie. He got shanghai'd into running the Mauvaise Chance Apartments, but he's a carpenter and construction manager by trade, with a sideline in demon-hunting -- specifically providing help to Slayers.
Not that he's doing much of either right now, because after way, way too long, he just married said boy-type person, changed his name, and moved to the future. Xander is still contactable by phone or e-mail if anybody needs him, though, and if you've got an off-island construction project? Give me him a buzz!.
Yes, that was the short version. He's been in the game since a week after it opened; long version is looong.
The Girl: Helen Francine unless it's Francine Helen but anyway she goes by Francine Peters, student
Also normal, human, mostly unpowered**, tall, dark-haired, kind of goofy... Hunh, I know there was something she had that Xander doesn't... Two of them, in fact. *eyes icon* Oh yeah, right. Eyes. But in appearance, she could definitely be Xander's younger sister, at least until she opens her mouth. She's both much less sarcastic, and possessed of a soft Tennessee-by-way-of-Texas drawl. Her definition of normal is a lot more normal than his, too; Francine's canon, Strangers in Paradise, is for the most part a dramedy version of the real world, with very faint supernatural elements. And the Lesbian Mafia.
No, RLY. Not that she knows they exist yet; that's thismaskiwear's story. Nope, Francine's just your everyday sweet, stacked, mildly shy girl next door who wants nothing more than to find and marry the boy of her dreams, and have his three point five beautiful babies. However her looks, a loving but slightly warped mother, and Francine's own passive personality have seriously skewed her take on relationships. She has absolutely no self-confidence, and her tendency to overeat when she's depressed or upset (or, you know, awake) results in the rest of her proportions being as generous as the goods in the window display. If a boy shows any interest, she'll assume 1) he's the best I can do, I should be grateful and 2) if I put out, he'll stick around. So the guys she tends to actually date while looking for Mr. Right are... come back, Dick Casablancas! Francine would invest years in a dude like you.
Francine came to Fandom High summer camp just after the end of her sophomore year at Puncture High in Houston, after the disappointment of her best friend having to run away from an abusive home, and the abject humiliation of Freddy Femur stepping on Francine's toga during the school play, leaving her naked onstage in front of half the world. Half the world when you're sixteen, anyway. (In canon, it was her senior play; for FH purposes, that's been rolled back a bit, so she'll be starting her junior year now.) Sad Francine = mmmm pancakes Francine = aren't those your fat jeans Francine = "You'll love summer camp, honey! Hiking, swimming, meeting a future doctor new friends, maybe take off a few of those extra pounds. Here's a snack for the plane; I made cupcakes." And she does kind of love it, after the island finally broke her brain and she decided a little crazy was really pretty awesome, if it came with wings and a suddenly-reappearing best friend.
So that's Francine: nice, insecure, a bit willfully naive. She loves the Beatles, food, Xena Bitterwoman, and boys who don't treat her right, and if there's the slightest opportunity to hideously embarrass herself, extra points for public nudity (the play was only the beginning; ask her canon version how she got expelled from college), she'll stumble into it face-first. Not that you'll be looking at her face.
____
**Francine is vaguely psychic: in canon she meets what was probably a ghost, she sees Katchoo's doppelganger during her friend's near-death experience, and Francine's dreams/fantasies about her own future when she's faced with a life-changing choice have a tendency to later prove partially true. None of which she's aware of yet at this point in her life.
The...Slightly Older Girl: Eliza Doolittle, townie
Eliza's only powers are a fierce temper when riled and the ability to look like Audrey Hepburn, but sound like Marnie Nixon when she sings. She's a scrappy twenty-one-year-old flower-girl off the streets of London who got turned into a proper lady by two experts in phonetics; she can still be snarky on occasion, but she's learned to express it in a ladylike manner. Since she's more self-confident now, she's less defensive and confrontational, and tends to be quite gentle with those who treat her the same way. In a pinch, though, she can screech like a banshee, and probably take out an eye in a catfight. ( But wait, there's more. In a different post. )
The Me: Pleased to meet you
Man, my Meez is freaky-accurate. Though much thinner. And taller. Then again everybody's taller than me, with a few gratifying exceptions. So availability: I'm on the crack-addled western edge of the Eastern timezone (srsly, we just adopted Daylight Savings Time last year), so despite being an hour and a half from Chicago, I'm on New York time. I work weekdays 8 to 5, more or less, and am sometimes available to play (and on IM) during those hours, sometimes not. I can usually answer e-mail, though, even if I'm busy. After 5 on weekdays, and most waking hours on weekends, I'm probably on IM.
Me as a player: Let's face it, a hummingbird hopped up on goofballs of activity, I am not. I'm better with Xander because he's got established friends and an ongoing story, but I always have been and probably always will be the kind of player who goes through long spurts of my characters only showing up where they absolutely have to, until I get a burst of energy, a long run of free time, a plot or a character interaction I can't resist. This is me; it's not you, it's not lack of interest in the game or other people's characters. (I have a lot more energy for reading your posts than making my own, it seems like.)
And self-analysis ho*, I'm close to as passive a person as Francine is: I react rather than acting, am more likely to show up in someone else's post than make my own, usually too shy to poke my nose into someone else's plot if I'm not explicitly asked, and places with a potential for a million threads like Common Rooms are a huge challenge to my concentration.
None of this means I won't be happy to play with you; I'd love to. Just poke me if you want or need me somewhere, think my character would work well in your plot, or need some brainstorming help. I love plotting; I'm just better at analyzing and building off one that somebody else came up with, than working up the energy to run my own. Grab me on e-mail or IM.
Contact: E-mail: soldtoarmenians at crackedverse dot com works; so does mpoetess at gmail dot com. IM: soldtoarmenians, crackedverse, thatsamilkshake, loverlyviolets. If I'm using an IM client that doesn't have screen-name linking, I'm usually under soldtoarmenians. RL LJ: mpoetess, though I'm woefully bad about posting anything but twitter updates and work rants there these days.
OOC Communication = Love. Please talk to me if anything I do bothers you, whether it's in-character actions or OOC gameplaying issues. I can't fix it if I don't realize it's happening. (Or not happening, if there's something I should be doing that I haven't been.) If you feel like pinging me in IM or e-mail just to shoot the breeze? That's awesome too. I tend to only venture into group chat when I've got a lot of concentration power or for plot coordination, but will be happy to head there if poked, too.
But What Have You Done For Me Lately? Icon slave at your service, time-permitting. If you need a character's hair or clothes re-colored, an OTP icon, prom dress, something cracky for a plot like...uh...a Carmen Miranda hat which I have never *cough* done to any of my characters, or 'hey, the Abominable Snowman and Hello Kitty are co-hosting radio tonight, can you make us an icon in the next half hour?' -- give me a poke. Not dirty. If I have time, I love doing that kind of stuff. Ditto "How do I fix this pre-play coding?" "I really need a pretty header graphic" or "Hey, where was that post about _________." I can has the skeery OCD with the best of them, and I enjoy helping with behind the scenes stuff.
PS: I can has a heromaniac every day and you can't. Neener. *hoards BFF*
*I am not a ho.
Xander is a normal human with no special powers, but he's spent years fighting evil supernatural creatures as part of a team, both at home and in Fandom. He's 28 (give or take 75 years, thx Weeping Angels), stupid-in-love with bridge_carson, BFF's with Willow Rosenberg (willbedone) and generally a laid-back, jokey kind of guy unless you're evil or mess with his People. He's also missing an eye; he wears a patch and is perfectly comfortable with pirate jokes of all colors. Not so comfortable with the prosthetic eye behind said patch, so not a lot of people know it's there. He also has a tattoo. That precisely three people have seen.
He's a Class of 2006 FH alumnus from the same beat-you-over-the-head-with-7-seasons canon as Buffy. He knows a Buffy (several, in fact), but not this one, and though he's as close to FH!Willow and Dawn as he is to his homegrown versions, he doesn't share a timeline with any of them. Xander was shipped to Fandom just before the end of BtVS Season 3 as part of a plan to get all the Sunnydale students out of town and avoid the canonical graduation battle.
He spent a year in Fandom, met a lot of new friends and new versions of old friends, fell in love with a boy-type-person, went home for college, and got stuck in a slightly-modified version of his canon timeline. Oops. After six years in his time and five months from Fandom's POV, he found his way back to Fandom while looking for Melaka Fray (cantjossme) and became a townie. He got shanghai'd into running the Mauvaise Chance Apartments, but he's a carpenter and construction manager by trade, with a sideline in demon-hunting -- specifically providing help to Slayers.
Not that he's doing much of either right now, because after way, way too long, he just married said boy-type person, changed his name, and moved to the future. Xander is still contactable by phone or e-mail if anybody needs him, though, and if you've got an off-island construction project? Give me him a buzz!.
Yes, that was the short version. He's been in the game since a week after it opened; long version is looong.
The Girl: Helen Francine unless it's Francine Helen but anyway she goes by Francine Peters, student
Also normal, human, mostly unpowered**, tall, dark-haired, kind of goofy... Hunh, I know there was something she had that Xander doesn't... Two of them, in fact. *eyes icon* Oh yeah, right. Eyes. But in appearance, she could definitely be Xander's younger sister, at least until she opens her mouth. She's both much less sarcastic, and possessed of a soft Tennessee-by-way-of-Texas drawl. Her definition of normal is a lot more normal than his, too; Francine's canon, Strangers in Paradise, is for the most part a dramedy version of the real world, with very faint supernatural elements. And the Lesbian Mafia.
No, RLY. Not that she knows they exist yet; that's thismaskiwear's story. Nope, Francine's just your everyday sweet, stacked, mildly shy girl next door who wants nothing more than to find and marry the boy of her dreams, and have his three point five beautiful babies. However her looks, a loving but slightly warped mother, and Francine's own passive personality have seriously skewed her take on relationships. She has absolutely no self-confidence, and her tendency to overeat when she's depressed or upset (or, you know, awake) results in the rest of her proportions being as generous as the goods in the window display. If a boy shows any interest, she'll assume 1) he's the best I can do, I should be grateful and 2) if I put out, he'll stick around. So the guys she tends to actually date while looking for Mr. Right are... come back, Dick Casablancas! Francine would invest years in a dude like you.
Francine came to Fandom High summer camp just after the end of her sophomore year at Puncture High in Houston, after the disappointment of her best friend having to run away from an abusive home, and the abject humiliation of Freddy Femur stepping on Francine's toga during the school play, leaving her naked onstage in front of half the world. Half the world when you're sixteen, anyway. (In canon, it was her senior play; for FH purposes, that's been rolled back a bit, so she'll be starting her junior year now.) Sad Francine = mmmm pancakes Francine = aren't those your fat jeans Francine = "You'll love summer camp, honey! Hiking, swimming, meeting a future doctor new friends, maybe take off a few of those extra pounds. Here's a snack for the plane; I made cupcakes." And she does kind of love it, after the island finally broke her brain and she decided a little crazy was really pretty awesome, if it came with wings and a suddenly-reappearing best friend.
So that's Francine: nice, insecure, a bit willfully naive. She loves the Beatles, food, Xena Bitterwoman, and boys who don't treat her right, and if there's the slightest opportunity to hideously embarrass herself, extra points for public nudity (the play was only the beginning; ask her canon version how she got expelled from college), she'll stumble into it face-first. Not that you'll be looking at her face.
____
**Francine is vaguely psychic: in canon she meets what was probably a ghost, she sees Katchoo's doppelganger during her friend's near-death experience, and Francine's dreams/fantasies about her own future when she's faced with a life-changing choice have a tendency to later prove partially true. None of which she's aware of yet at this point in her life.
The...Slightly Older Girl: Eliza Doolittle, townie
Eliza's only powers are a fierce temper when riled and the ability to look like Audrey Hepburn, but sound like Marnie Nixon when she sings. She's a scrappy twenty-one-year-old flower-girl off the streets of London who got turned into a proper lady by two experts in phonetics; she can still be snarky on occasion, but she's learned to express it in a ladylike manner. Since she's more self-confident now, she's less defensive and confrontational, and tends to be quite gentle with those who treat her the same way. In a pinch, though, she can screech like a banshee, and probably take out an eye in a catfight. ( But wait, there's more. In a different post. )
The Me: Pleased to meet you
Man, my Meez is freaky-accurate. Though much thinner. And taller. Then again everybody's taller than me, with a few gratifying exceptions. So availability: I'm on the crack-addled western edge of the Eastern timezone (srsly, we just adopted Daylight Savings Time last year), so despite being an hour and a half from Chicago, I'm on New York time. I work weekdays 8 to 5, more or less, and am sometimes available to play (and on IM) during those hours, sometimes not. I can usually answer e-mail, though, even if I'm busy. After 5 on weekdays, and most waking hours on weekends, I'm probably on IM.
Me as a player: Let's face it, a hummingbird hopped up on goofballs of activity, I am not. I'm better with Xander because he's got established friends and an ongoing story, but I always have been and probably always will be the kind of player who goes through long spurts of my characters only showing up where they absolutely have to, until I get a burst of energy, a long run of free time, a plot or a character interaction I can't resist. This is me; it's not you, it's not lack of interest in the game or other people's characters. (I have a lot more energy for reading your posts than making my own, it seems like.)
And self-analysis ho*, I'm close to as passive a person as Francine is: I react rather than acting, am more likely to show up in someone else's post than make my own, usually too shy to poke my nose into someone else's plot if I'm not explicitly asked, and places with a potential for a million threads like Common Rooms are a huge challenge to my concentration.
None of this means I won't be happy to play with you; I'd love to. Just poke me if you want or need me somewhere, think my character would work well in your plot, or need some brainstorming help. I love plotting; I'm just better at analyzing and building off one that somebody else came up with, than working up the energy to run my own. Grab me on e-mail or IM.
Contact: E-mail: soldtoarmenians at crackedverse dot com works; so does mpoetess at gmail dot com. IM: soldtoarmenians, crackedverse, thatsamilkshake, loverlyviolets. If I'm using an IM client that doesn't have screen-name linking, I'm usually under soldtoarmenians. RL LJ: mpoetess, though I'm woefully bad about posting anything but twitter updates and work rants there these days.
OOC Communication = Love. Please talk to me if anything I do bothers you, whether it's in-character actions or OOC gameplaying issues. I can't fix it if I don't realize it's happening. (Or not happening, if there's something I should be doing that I haven't been.) If you feel like pinging me in IM or e-mail just to shoot the breeze? That's awesome too. I tend to only venture into group chat when I've got a lot of concentration power or for plot coordination, but will be happy to head there if poked, too.
But What Have You Done For Me Lately? Icon slave at your service, time-permitting. If you need a character's hair or clothes re-colored, an OTP icon, prom dress, something cracky for a plot like...uh...a Carmen Miranda hat which I have never *cough* done to any of my characters, or 'hey, the Abominable Snowman and Hello Kitty are co-hosting radio tonight, can you make us an icon in the next half hour?' -- give me a poke. Not dirty. If I have time, I love doing that kind of stuff. Ditto "How do I fix this pre-play coding?" "I really need a pretty header graphic" or "Hey, where was that post about _________." I can has the skeery OCD with the best of them, and I enjoy helping with behind the scenes stuff.
PS: I can has a heromaniac every day and you can't. Neener. *hoards BFF*
*I am not a ho.