Ashraf al-Mansur (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
negativecapability) wrote2016-01-09 09:37 am
negativecapability) wrote2016-01-09 09:37 am
Clarion App
Student Application
PLAYER
name | Snow
age | 25
new or returning player? | New
preferred contact method |![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
snowishness | snow
CHARACTER
character name | Ashraf al-Mansur
age | 16
year | Second Year
gender | Male
appearance | Raf is canon he’s described as having blond hair, blue eyes, high cheekbones, and a heavy nose. He’s also described as being pretty much the spitting image of his father. He has scars on his left shoulder. (From carrying a live fox out of a burning building). In canon he’s fairly muscular and strong, but when he was younger he was thinner and much more ‘public school’ in appearance so that’s what I’m going with here. I’m currently using Tolga Sarıtaş as my PB.
history | Raf is from an alternate universe, where World War One never expanded out of the Balkans, and therefore didn't become WWI. World War II never happened. Israel doesn't exist. The Ottoman Empire does. Russia is divided and the US is isolationist. Monarchy is the default form of government in Europe. Islam is more Sufist than it is in our universe. British imperialism was halted well before it was in the real world.
Raf's mother is a semi-famous wildlife television personality. She told Raf -- whose name then was something-starting-with-a-Z (it's not that I can't remember, it's just not specified) Welham -- growing up that his father was a Swedish hitchhiker she never caught the name of. Raf was genetically engineered prior to birth, with surgery continuing intermittently until he was five. She was a big believer that humanity needed to keep evolving, and her vision is clear in Raf's modifications. When Raf was five the labs he was in caught on fire, and he rescued a fox which was subject to some experimentation of its own. He carried it out even though its claws dug into his shoulder.
Raf was born sometime around 2030, and he grew up in boarding schools in Switzerland, Scotland, England, and briefly a non-boarding but still private school in New York, while he lived with his mother. She never showed any particular interest in Raf once he passed the age of five, and while he ran away from school several times to go home under the assumption that she would care if she was there, he eventually stopped trying.
When he was fifteen, he ran away from his boarding school in England to go to Seattle, where he wound up working under a crime boss for a couple of years. He was low in the organization, but rising despite his unwillingness to use violence to the same extent that others in the organization did. He was mostly a courier, delivering notices to people who owed Hu San (the crime boss) money. At this point the name he was going by was ZeeZee. This lasted for a couple of years.
At one point, Raf got suspicious that some people were completely gone when he went to deliver notices and switched around the order he visited them in, concerned that they were being warned. He walked into a murder scene, and he was set up to take the fall, since he'd been fighting with Hu San's boyfriend, and he'd decided to get rid of Raf.
Raf was arrested, but all he said when questioned under a lie detector was that he didn't do it. (He couldn't name Hu San or her boyfriend because then she would certainly have him killed.) He was declared clinically insane, as the evidence was that he had done the crime but he clearly didn't remember doing it. An incredible amount of money was spent to put Raf in a 'soft' prison, one that focused on light therapy and counseling. He was sentenced to life in prison, however.
One day (after a number of years there, during which he starts working on a PhD in history), he is broken out, handed a briefcase, and driven to the airport. Inside the briefcase is a credit card, a diplomatic passport of the Ottoman Empire with the name 'Ashraf al-Mansur' and a picture that looks startlingly like him, but in a haircut he's never had, and a plane ticket to El Iskandriya (Alexandria, Egypt). As well, there's some family history, of his father's side. Raf's father is said to be the Emir of Tunis, and there's a marriage certificate written mostly in Arabic stating he was legally married to Raf's mother at the time of Raf's conception. (Raf can't read Arabic, yet. He does learn it after getting to El Iskandriya.)
When he arrives in El Iskandriya Raf dodges the man sent to meet him at the airport, uses the credit card to buy himself a very expensive new suit and sunglasses, fights a man in an alley, and then shows up at his alleged aunt -- Lady Nafisa -- 's house. That evening he meets the woman it's been decided he'd marry: Zara bint-Hamzah. She's the daughter of a wealthy industrialist, and her marriage to Raf (the son of an emir, or pashazade) would raise her father's social status while helping Lady Nafisa out of her debt. Raf refuses, because Zara doesn't want to get married.
Sometime after that, Lady Nafisa is murdered in her home. Raf is accused, but then cleared of the murder, and in the course of it makes friends with the Chief of Detectives, Felix Abrinsky. Felix, however, is killed by a bomb meant for Raf by Lady Jalila, the same person who had murdered Lady Nafisa. Raf finds out about both of them, confronts Lady Jalila and kills her when she threatens both Zara and Hani's lives.
Raf is genetically engineered. As a result he has enhanced speed and strength, can see in ultra-violet and infrared, much higher-than-average hearing, and an eidetic memory. He has extra ribs to protect soft organs and small muscles that let him close his ear, nictitating membranes he can use to cover his eyes and protect them. He's also immortal -- in the sense that he won't die from old age -- although that's not a thing he's aware of. His body can self-repair at a faster rate than an ordinary human, but not a ridiculous level.
There is also a computer chip implanted in his brain carrying the artificial personality of a fox, which Raf thinks sometimes is just a hallucination. In addition to providing him with some level of companionship the arctic fox, Tiri, advises Raf in battle situations, increasing the speed of his reflexes enormously. He's also an explosives expert, crack shot, and very skilled in unarmed combat.
AU history | Raf was born Zack Welham in New York to Sally Welham, father not listed on his original birth certificate. Sally is an artist and comes from old money, and a lot of it, so while her having a child out of wedlock was certainly notable it didn’t mean an end to her career or social life. ‘Zack’ stayed with her until he was five, when he was sent to the first boarding school. At that point she lost interest in him, and Raf spent the rest of his childhood moving from boarding school to boarding school.
At seven, his current boarding school in Scotland had a fire in the living area. He could have made it out easily, but went back for a fox which was being kept as the school’s mascot. Raf and the fox were both fine with only minor burns, but the fox’s claws did dig into Raf’s shoulder.
The first time he tried to run away was when he was eleven, and it was at that point that he learned about his father. It was also the point at which his father learned about him, and Sally Welham admitted that she’d married him. ‘Zack’s’ birth certificate was amended and his name changed to Ashraf al-Mansur. His mother and father haven’t had any further contact, however, and beyond being named as his father’s heir, Raf has had no further contact with him.
Raf has stayed in boarding schools, generally being bored out of his mind. He has no real experience with family. There’s only really his mother, and she isn’t the loving sort. As a child at boarding school, Raf's eidetic memory means that he picked up on schoolwork more quickly than it would be taught and didn't connect with the other children at all. Mostly they’re just not much-interested in him and neither is he in them. They have their families and their concerns, and Raf is beginning to understand that he doesn’t really have a family, just parents to whom he’s served a purpose. He has books that he reads and in the past the schools have only been concerned with how good the students are at memorizing things, which in Raf’s case is ‘very’.
All of his boarding schools until now have been single-sex. He’s coming from a very prestigious boarding school in Switzerland, and is back in the vain hope that being in New England will mean his mother will pay him more attention.
personality |
Raf is, he accepts himself, more than a little bit crazy. He's well past the point of caring if anyone knows: he talks to the fox in his head no matter what people can overhear by way of his response. The fox, Tiri (short for Tiriganiaq, Inuktitut for Arctic fox), has been a part of Raf’s life ever since he was seven and there was the fire, and Raf doesn’t need an explanation for his existence. Tiri is simply a part of Raf's life, a hallucination that he's partly codependent with. Tiri is important to Raf's mental state and helps him with the fact that he can internalize so much. Tiri needs Raf because without him he has no one to talk to, the worst thing Raf could do to Tiri would be to stop acknowledging his existence. His hallucinations aren't limited to Tiri — other traumatic reactions can form other constructs, although they’ll always be simpler and Raf’s interactions with them will be more rudimentary.
Raf is in parts both incredibly flexible and really really rigid.
He's flexible when it comes to himself: he shifts his name, his appearance, and his habits. When given the name Raf instead of Zack, he accepts it, along with the fact that people treat him differently when he’s Ashraf al-Mansur, son of a Bey, than when he was Zack Welham, son of the mildly-known artist Sally Welham. Raf has an incredible ability to blend in, and he adapts the kind of responses he gives depending on who he's talking to and what their personality is. (It isn't a simple matter of shifting to get along with someone better. When faced with someone with a more aggressive personality, he behaves aggressively.) Raf changing is really about him fitting in, not about him making friends.
His rigidity comes from his moral code. He does what he thinks is right, no matter the consequences. While Raf regrets the circumstances around his actions sometimes, he does what is right and what he knows he has to do. He can also make these decisions very quickly. He has some emotions, particularly a feeling of abandonment from his mother, but in general he’s not an emotional person.
One thing that Raf is firm about is the fact that he's an atheist. His doubts initially started when at around age ten he wondered if the fact he didn’t have a soul. He asked Tiri, who didn't answer him, so Raf thought about it himself. The conclusion he reached -- that souls weren't real -- put him at odds with the protestant boarding school he was attending. Raf spent a Scottish winter of Sundays running instead of going to chapel, and that was the end of that.
Raf's someone who bluffs his way through things until he has an actual hold on them. He doesn't need to figure things out in order to react to them, and he knows in many cases pretending does him just as much good as actually knowing would. His momentum keeps carrying him forward, and stopping to get his bearings would just be a waste of time.
SAMPLES
sample 1 | The start of classes was in some ways a relief, because it was boring without them, because having something to do was better than absolutely nothing. In other ways, though, it was just the continuation of having time to pass. The slight (less than 2%) chance that his mother would visit him before classes was over with, unrealized, and she had an exhibition opening the next weekend. Classes were unlikely to be too interesting, although the fact that there were girls around was at least different.
Speaking of those, Raf still wasn’t sure what the rules of engagement ought to be, so he ducked his head, lowering his eyes when he passed one of the female students. He’d figure it out by watching the other boys, there hadn’t been any books in the library to help with this. He’d looked.
“Ah, good morning,” he said to the girl before they were fully passed. At least he’d said it when they were close enough that she didn’t really have a chance to respond.
The layout of the school was logical, or felt that way to Raf, who had memorized it. It was a simple enough matter to make it to his first class, to pick a desk near the middle of the room, and to prepare to be very very bored.
sample 2 | Link
PLAYER
name | Snow
age | 25
new or returning player? | New
preferred contact method |
snowCHARACTER
character name | Ashraf al-Mansur
age | 16
year | Second Year
gender | Male
appearance | Raf is canon he’s described as having blond hair, blue eyes, high cheekbones, and a heavy nose. He’s also described as being pretty much the spitting image of his father. He has scars on his left shoulder. (From carrying a live fox out of a burning building). In canon he’s fairly muscular and strong, but when he was younger he was thinner and much more ‘public school’ in appearance so that’s what I’m going with here. I’m currently using Tolga Sarıtaş as my PB.
history | Raf is from an alternate universe, where World War One never expanded out of the Balkans, and therefore didn't become WWI. World War II never happened. Israel doesn't exist. The Ottoman Empire does. Russia is divided and the US is isolationist. Monarchy is the default form of government in Europe. Islam is more Sufist than it is in our universe. British imperialism was halted well before it was in the real world.
Raf's mother is a semi-famous wildlife television personality. She told Raf -- whose name then was something-starting-with-a-Z (it's not that I can't remember, it's just not specified) Welham -- growing up that his father was a Swedish hitchhiker she never caught the name of. Raf was genetically engineered prior to birth, with surgery continuing intermittently until he was five. She was a big believer that humanity needed to keep evolving, and her vision is clear in Raf's modifications. When Raf was five the labs he was in caught on fire, and he rescued a fox which was subject to some experimentation of its own. He carried it out even though its claws dug into his shoulder.
Raf was born sometime around 2030, and he grew up in boarding schools in Switzerland, Scotland, England, and briefly a non-boarding but still private school in New York, while he lived with his mother. She never showed any particular interest in Raf once he passed the age of five, and while he ran away from school several times to go home under the assumption that she would care if she was there, he eventually stopped trying.
When he was fifteen, he ran away from his boarding school in England to go to Seattle, where he wound up working under a crime boss for a couple of years. He was low in the organization, but rising despite his unwillingness to use violence to the same extent that others in the organization did. He was mostly a courier, delivering notices to people who owed Hu San (the crime boss) money. At this point the name he was going by was ZeeZee. This lasted for a couple of years.
At one point, Raf got suspicious that some people were completely gone when he went to deliver notices and switched around the order he visited them in, concerned that they were being warned. He walked into a murder scene, and he was set up to take the fall, since he'd been fighting with Hu San's boyfriend, and he'd decided to get rid of Raf.
Raf was arrested, but all he said when questioned under a lie detector was that he didn't do it. (He couldn't name Hu San or her boyfriend because then she would certainly have him killed.) He was declared clinically insane, as the evidence was that he had done the crime but he clearly didn't remember doing it. An incredible amount of money was spent to put Raf in a 'soft' prison, one that focused on light therapy and counseling. He was sentenced to life in prison, however.
One day (after a number of years there, during which he starts working on a PhD in history), he is broken out, handed a briefcase, and driven to the airport. Inside the briefcase is a credit card, a diplomatic passport of the Ottoman Empire with the name 'Ashraf al-Mansur' and a picture that looks startlingly like him, but in a haircut he's never had, and a plane ticket to El Iskandriya (Alexandria, Egypt). As well, there's some family history, of his father's side. Raf's father is said to be the Emir of Tunis, and there's a marriage certificate written mostly in Arabic stating he was legally married to Raf's mother at the time of Raf's conception. (Raf can't read Arabic, yet. He does learn it after getting to El Iskandriya.)
When he arrives in El Iskandriya Raf dodges the man sent to meet him at the airport, uses the credit card to buy himself a very expensive new suit and sunglasses, fights a man in an alley, and then shows up at his alleged aunt -- Lady Nafisa -- 's house. That evening he meets the woman it's been decided he'd marry: Zara bint-Hamzah. She's the daughter of a wealthy industrialist, and her marriage to Raf (the son of an emir, or pashazade) would raise her father's social status while helping Lady Nafisa out of her debt. Raf refuses, because Zara doesn't want to get married.
Sometime after that, Lady Nafisa is murdered in her home. Raf is accused, but then cleared of the murder, and in the course of it makes friends with the Chief of Detectives, Felix Abrinsky. Felix, however, is killed by a bomb meant for Raf by Lady Jalila, the same person who had murdered Lady Nafisa. Raf finds out about both of them, confronts Lady Jalila and kills her when she threatens both Zara and Hani's lives.
Raf is genetically engineered. As a result he has enhanced speed and strength, can see in ultra-violet and infrared, much higher-than-average hearing, and an eidetic memory. He has extra ribs to protect soft organs and small muscles that let him close his ear, nictitating membranes he can use to cover his eyes and protect them. He's also immortal -- in the sense that he won't die from old age -- although that's not a thing he's aware of. His body can self-repair at a faster rate than an ordinary human, but not a ridiculous level.
There is also a computer chip implanted in his brain carrying the artificial personality of a fox, which Raf thinks sometimes is just a hallucination. In addition to providing him with some level of companionship the arctic fox, Tiri, advises Raf in battle situations, increasing the speed of his reflexes enormously. He's also an explosives expert, crack shot, and very skilled in unarmed combat.
AU history | Raf was born Zack Welham in New York to Sally Welham, father not listed on his original birth certificate. Sally is an artist and comes from old money, and a lot of it, so while her having a child out of wedlock was certainly notable it didn’t mean an end to her career or social life. ‘Zack’ stayed with her until he was five, when he was sent to the first boarding school. At that point she lost interest in him, and Raf spent the rest of his childhood moving from boarding school to boarding school.
At seven, his current boarding school in Scotland had a fire in the living area. He could have made it out easily, but went back for a fox which was being kept as the school’s mascot. Raf and the fox were both fine with only minor burns, but the fox’s claws did dig into Raf’s shoulder.
The first time he tried to run away was when he was eleven, and it was at that point that he learned about his father. It was also the point at which his father learned about him, and Sally Welham admitted that she’d married him. ‘Zack’s’ birth certificate was amended and his name changed to Ashraf al-Mansur. His mother and father haven’t had any further contact, however, and beyond being named as his father’s heir, Raf has had no further contact with him.
Raf has stayed in boarding schools, generally being bored out of his mind. He has no real experience with family. There’s only really his mother, and she isn’t the loving sort. As a child at boarding school, Raf's eidetic memory means that he picked up on schoolwork more quickly than it would be taught and didn't connect with the other children at all. Mostly they’re just not much-interested in him and neither is he in them. They have their families and their concerns, and Raf is beginning to understand that he doesn’t really have a family, just parents to whom he’s served a purpose. He has books that he reads and in the past the schools have only been concerned with how good the students are at memorizing things, which in Raf’s case is ‘very’.
All of his boarding schools until now have been single-sex. He’s coming from a very prestigious boarding school in Switzerland, and is back in the vain hope that being in New England will mean his mother will pay him more attention.
personality |
Raf is, he accepts himself, more than a little bit crazy. He's well past the point of caring if anyone knows: he talks to the fox in his head no matter what people can overhear by way of his response. The fox, Tiri (short for Tiriganiaq, Inuktitut for Arctic fox), has been a part of Raf’s life ever since he was seven and there was the fire, and Raf doesn’t need an explanation for his existence. Tiri is simply a part of Raf's life, a hallucination that he's partly codependent with. Tiri is important to Raf's mental state and helps him with the fact that he can internalize so much. Tiri needs Raf because without him he has no one to talk to, the worst thing Raf could do to Tiri would be to stop acknowledging his existence. His hallucinations aren't limited to Tiri — other traumatic reactions can form other constructs, although they’ll always be simpler and Raf’s interactions with them will be more rudimentary.
Raf is in parts both incredibly flexible and really really rigid.
He's flexible when it comes to himself: he shifts his name, his appearance, and his habits. When given the name Raf instead of Zack, he accepts it, along with the fact that people treat him differently when he’s Ashraf al-Mansur, son of a Bey, than when he was Zack Welham, son of the mildly-known artist Sally Welham. Raf has an incredible ability to blend in, and he adapts the kind of responses he gives depending on who he's talking to and what their personality is. (It isn't a simple matter of shifting to get along with someone better. When faced with someone with a more aggressive personality, he behaves aggressively.) Raf changing is really about him fitting in, not about him making friends.
His rigidity comes from his moral code. He does what he thinks is right, no matter the consequences. While Raf regrets the circumstances around his actions sometimes, he does what is right and what he knows he has to do. He can also make these decisions very quickly. He has some emotions, particularly a feeling of abandonment from his mother, but in general he’s not an emotional person.
One thing that Raf is firm about is the fact that he's an atheist. His doubts initially started when at around age ten he wondered if the fact he didn’t have a soul. He asked Tiri, who didn't answer him, so Raf thought about it himself. The conclusion he reached -- that souls weren't real -- put him at odds with the protestant boarding school he was attending. Raf spent a Scottish winter of Sundays running instead of going to chapel, and that was the end of that.
Raf's someone who bluffs his way through things until he has an actual hold on them. He doesn't need to figure things out in order to react to them, and he knows in many cases pretending does him just as much good as actually knowing would. His momentum keeps carrying him forward, and stopping to get his bearings would just be a waste of time.
SAMPLES
sample 1 | The start of classes was in some ways a relief, because it was boring without them, because having something to do was better than absolutely nothing. In other ways, though, it was just the continuation of having time to pass. The slight (less than 2%) chance that his mother would visit him before classes was over with, unrealized, and she had an exhibition opening the next weekend. Classes were unlikely to be too interesting, although the fact that there were girls around was at least different.
Speaking of those, Raf still wasn’t sure what the rules of engagement ought to be, so he ducked his head, lowering his eyes when he passed one of the female students. He’d figure it out by watching the other boys, there hadn’t been any books in the library to help with this. He’d looked.
“Ah, good morning,” he said to the girl before they were fully passed. At least he’d said it when they were close enough that she didn’t really have a chance to respond.
The layout of the school was logical, or felt that way to Raf, who had memorized it. It was a simple enough matter to make it to his first class, to pick a desk near the middle of the room, and to prepare to be very very bored.
sample 2 | Link