[baedal app] it's a feeling more akin to having been born in captivity

[incaptivity]

Out of Character Information
Name: Jenni
Username: jennibeans
Are you over the age of eighteen? Yep.
Current characters in Baedal: Jack Benjamin, Pietro Maximoff

In Character Information
Basics
Character Name: Hal Yorke (His full name is Henry, but he has gone by "Harry" in the past and currently prefers "Hal.")
Username: incaptivity
Fandom: Being Human (UK)
Played By: Damien Molony
Icon: default is fine.

Canon Character Section
Physical Description:
Hal appears to be in his late twenties. He has wavy to curly brown hair and hazel eyes. His build is fairly average, though a little on the small side, and he is fit in the sense that it's pretty clear he works out all the time, but bulky muscles just aren't natural for his frame. He dresses conservatively, usually wearing polos or long-sleeved shirts with buttons (even just from the sternum up), buttoned all the way to the top. He almost never goes sleeveless. Other than polos, he almost never wears shirts with collars, preferring band collars even with his suits. (And in suits, he prefers three-piece with suspenders.) In general, his look is old-fashioned and uptight. Other notable physical qualities include a burn on his right shoulder, from werewolf blood.

Sexuality:
Hal is predominantly straight. In canon, he scoffs a bit at idea of him having a boyfriend, and when he and Tom pose as a gay couple, he is the most long-suffering of co-conspirators (although that probably has more to do with the idea of dating Tom). There is room for flexibility in his sexuality, certainly—he's not particularly attached to any moral or religious basis for heterosexuality, he has close on-screen relationships with men, and it's reasonable to assume he's done a hell of a lot in 500 years. However, Hal's interest in women is p…retty much insane, so saying he doesn't mind men but prefers women is kind of like saying an alcoholic doesn't mind water but prefers whiskey.

When Hal was alive, he was already a bit rakish. He was, however, fairly aimless and discontent with the world, so his escapades were primarily restricted to girls in port towns and taverns, with the occasional brief affair with a married woman or the daughter of a lord. Then he was turned, and his womanizing rose to a whole new (and more disturbing) level. Vampirism in BH 'verse doesn't seem to make you evil, per se, it just amplifies the personality traits you already possess—and adds blood addiction to the mix. For Hal, that meant becoming the kind of guy who always had a lady on each arm, who once wooed a woman with a thousand tulips, who would pursue the object of his desire for years if need be—or keep her in a dungeon for months to feed off her until she went insane, depending on whether he was feeling kind or cruel.

[TW: rape] As with most BH vampires, blood is closely tied to sex for Hal, but unlike Mitchell, for instance, sex doesn't seem to have been purely a means to an end. If Hal just wanted blood, one-night stands and casual hook-ups are far easier; instead, he romanced his victims to the point that some of them are still in love with him even after he's eaten their hearts. Blood may be the source of his addiction, but the way he's gone about obtaining it betrays as much interest in sexual conquest and manipulation. It's important to understand that, while Hal doesn't think of himself as a rapist (because consent for sex itself is important to him, see: history), his victims would probably disagree. There's a line between seduction and manipulation, and Hal has definitely crossed that—not to mention the implications of drinking his partners' blood without their consent, when blood is that closely tied to sex in his mind. Vampirism as a metaphor for rape is not a new trope, and when Hal is drinking blood, he comes closer to that trope than most BH vampires do. This is one of many reasons he hates the person he becomes when he's drinking blood; it's not just the guilt of having killed people, it's that he is an all-around horrible person when he's drinking blood. [/TW]

Thankfully, Hal is currently "on the wagon," so to speak; he hasn't killed anyone for 55 years, and has only slipped up and drank blood a few times during that period, without killing any human beings. (There may have been a budgie—and a terrier—but we don't talk about that.) As such, he has also not gotten laid in 55 years. His self-control is so tenuous he'd rather not venture into crowded public places, let alone be in close proximity with a human woman, and that's to say nothing of physical contact. At one point, he was able to have sex without feeding and feed without killing, but that was when he was getting fed regularly; now he doesn't think he could control himself, so he tries to avoid the temptation altogether. Consequently, he comes off as hugely sexually repressed—and he is, just, y'know, not out of shame about sexuality, but because he's trying not to rip anyone's throat out. It's possible he could arrive at some kind of middle ground someday, but it's just as likely that attempting to do so would cause him to relapse.

History:
Hal was born in 1487 to a brothel of six women. He has no idea who his father was, or even which of women who raised him was his mother, and so his surname, Yorke, is most likely derived from his place of origin. In 15th- and 16th-century York, brothels (and prostitutes themselves) were forbidden from being within the walls of the city, so Hal was born and raised on the outskirts, but when he was old enough to go out on his own, he was also the best candidate for running errands and taking care of other business in town. Combined with the fact that York was a major port and his home was a brothel, it's likely he had a varied, relatively cosmopolitan upbringing, and was exposed to a lot of different kinds of people—many of whom had money and social status, which put his own status in sharp relief at an early age. He was intelligent, willful, and ambitious, but due to being the bastard son of prostitutes, very few avenues of advancement were open to him. Consequently, he developed a lot of resentment toward the circumstances of his birth, and vis-a-vis his mothers.

[TW: rape] With six mothers who all had fairly steady incomes, he was well looked after and probably better fed than many, but the prevailing attitude that common women's bodies were common property meant that, growing up, he was likely exposed to a lot of sexual violence and general misogyny. He didn't internalize all of it; despite his frustrations with his status, he was close to all of his mothers, and witnessing that kind of violence (be it the act or the aftermath) against people he loved certainly didn't endear him to the kind of men who enacted it, particularly considering more than one of his mothers was killed that way. But he didn't white-knight about it, either; he was too young to do anything at first, and as he grew up, that kind of violence was too socially normalized and inescapably present in his life. Instead, he became desensitized to it and increasingly disgusted with the world as a result. By the time he reached adulthood, all of his mothers had died from violence or disease, and he had very little left to ground him.[/TW]

He left York, joining the crew of a ship and heading to sea for a time, until he got tired of that, too, and found another menial job to get by on, then another, drifting through the seedy underbelly of late medieval society. In 1514 he ended up in Gdańsk, signed up with the Polish mercenary infantry, and caught the wrong end of a lance during the Battle of Orsha. It was there that he died and was turned. In canon, he explains that by the time he was a young man "I'd seen every dark corner of the human heart, so when the army surgeon offered me eternal life in return for what little God had left me of my soul, I accepted—not because I feared death, but because I could think of nothing that deserved my loyalty any more." By the time he was turned, he was wholly disillusioned with humanity and with the opportunities life had offered him. Luckily, vampirism offered him something more.

While it's not explicitly stated in canon whether Mr. Snow was Hal's maker, certainly him or someone like him would fit the bill. Hal was carefully mentored in his transition to vampirism. He saw vampirism as the escape he deserved, freeing him from his mortal life and from the social confines of his birth. Under the tutelage of his maker, he reinvented himself as a member of the nobility—educated himself, learned how to dress and carry himself, even changed his accent to reflect his desired status. He did have some difficulty with killing at first, but without any mortal attachments, that didn't last long, and once he started killing, he didn't stop. Being free from morality was just another part of his freedom from the human world. This was the first of his cruel cycles, and though it was not the cruelest, it certainly established a pattern for years to come. In fact, creating (and wholeheartedly adopting) this identity as a member of the nobility may well have been the root of his identity split. He tried to destroy the person he was and become someone more powerful and emotionally resilient—and he succeeded, just not permanently.

Over the next four-hundred years, he became many different people—some cruel and some kind, as he says in canon. The kind ones were usually lovers, epic romantics, still social heavy-hitters but more reclusive and adaptable to less choice occupations when necessity dictated. While he was never clean from blood, he killed sparingly and guiltily, with varying levels of self-hatred. Of course, then he'd relapse and wipe out a small village, so you have to wonder if the kind personalities were really worth their price. The cruel ones were the earth-shakers, powerhouses who left in their wakes trails of carnage so wide and depraved it made other vampires uncomfortable. In fact, by the 1850s, nearly every vampire except Mr. Snow did fear him. He tended toward positions of power in the vampire community, everything from running crime rings to posing as a commander in the British Army during the Crimean War just so he and his vampire entourage could go gallivanting through the countryside slaughtering the locals (...like you do). Every time he cycled back from kind to cruel, the body count climbed, and these two expressions of his personality became more and more polarized.

In 1950, during the most recent and worst of his cruel cycles, he was running a "dog-fighting" racket that pitted humans against werewolves during their transformations. Through an unfortunate failure on the part of his lawyer, he was arrested for illegal gambling, and subsequently decided a new lawyer was in order. He chose the young and ambitious Nick Cutler, who he turned unwillingly and mentored in vampirism much as he himself had been mentored. Cutler was reluctant to shed his humanity entirely, however, so Hal...helped. Unable to convince Cutler to kill his wife and cut ties with the mortal world, Hal killed Mrs. Cutler for him, then tricked Nick into drinking her blood, only revealing afterward that it was his own wife's blood he'd been drinking. Understandably, Cutler didn't appreciate the joke, but it was certainly an effective way to crush a person's humanity.

Rather abruptly thereafter, Hal began struggling with his conscience once more. In 1955, he found himself spending more and more time in the basement with one of the werewolves he'd chained up for dog fights, Leo. Hal was looking for an escape, a chance to stop being this person he hated, and when Leo realized what he was looking for, he offered to guide Hal in exchange for his freedom. Hal helped Leo escape (thereby abandoning the still-fledgling Cutler), and together they moved into an apartment above a barber shop in Southend-on-Sea, which happened to already be occupied by a ghost named Pearl.

Hal, Leo, and Pearl spend 55 years together in that barber shop. There were some slip-ups along Hal's path to recovery, but in all that time he hasn't killed any humans. He also hasn't hardly left the apartment. Leo's strategy for dealing with Hal's condition focused on minimizing temptation and using constant activity and routine to keep the mind occupied. This appealed to Hal's appreciation for order and self-discipline, and so it worked for a very long time. Unlike Hal and Pearl, however, Leo was not immortal. When it became clear he wouldn't survive another transformation, an "angel" told Leo to go to Barry to see a baby that was supposed to be the savior of mankind, and to be cured.

Baby Eve didn't actually have any healing powers, but the move brought Hal and Pearl into the home of another werewolf, Tom, and another ghost, Annie. Leo hoped that having Tom and Annie there would help ease Hal and Pearl's transition when he died. What none of them expected was, when Leo passed, Pearl's door to the afterlife appeared as well; apparently her unfinished business had been to tell Leo she loved him, and once she'd done that, they both passed over, leaving Hal alone.

Hal didn't initially take well to losing his friends or being in a new environment. However, he grew close to Annie and Tom in time. His wikipedia article covers the events of series 4 well enough. The canon point I am using is three weeks after the end of series 4, when Tom and Alex tied him to a chair to help him detox from blood. While properly detoxing can take up to six months for BH vampires, this canon point will mean he's through the worst of it, and he's reached the point of remembering why he wants to stay clean at all. The transition to Baedal will still not be easy for him, but being a little farther along in his recovery will at least allow him not to fall off the wagon immediately without external intervention.

Powers: Vamipires in BH 'verse have increased strength, heightened senses, and improved ability to heal when they're drinking blood. They are only mildly irritated by sunlight (which, at Hal's age doesn't actually seem to bother him at all), and while most are deflected by religious objects, apparently that only lasts for the first few hundred years; as an Old One, Hal is not affected. It's not clear whether he actually need anything to survive, but abstinence from blood weakens him over time, and he does get hungry and thirsty just like a living person. He has no reflection and his image cannot be captured on film. In order to enter a building, he needs to be invited in, but once the invitation has been given, it lasts pretty much indefinitely, and he can invite other vampires in. He can be killed by a stake through the heart, and werewolf blood is poisonous to him. He can also identify some supernatural creatures by smell, but not all, even within his own world; in Baedal, he probably will not be able to categorize much beyond vampires, werewolves, humans, and not human, at least until he gets more familiar with Baedal's variety.

Talents/Abilities: Hal can do origami, embroider, play the lute, recite poetry from memory, read Latin, and read and speak Middle English, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, and German with a fair amount of fluency. He can also get by in a number of other languages, including Polish, Hungarian, and Ottoman Turkish. He can fence, ride a horse, and fight with a pike or a sword/shield (...or a gun, but he'd rather not). Notably, he is completely inept with technology, particularly anything that gained popularity after 1955.

Personality:
Hal talks about his personality as a changeable thing, which has gone through innumerable cycles during his lifetime, from bad to good to bad again. There are a few constants, however. He's fastidious, controlled (in one way or another), the kind of person who doesn't like anything out of place and requires a fair amount of authority over his own environment. He tends to be polite and soft-spoken, not out of meekness but because he can effectively command respect without raising his voice. While the size of his ego depends on whether he's drinking blood or not, he always has a certain level of pride and consequently reacts poorly to anything he sees as disrespect. He's rarely able to laugh at himself—which is unfortunate because he's often kind of ridiculous. (He has far less dignity than he thinks he has.) More generally, he always comes off as intelligent, cultured, well-spoken, and conscious of decorum. (Except, y'know, when he's singing falsetto and dancing with a mop in his spare time; see: far less dignity than he thinks he has.)

When Hal is in a bad cycle, he is basically a sociopath. He understands that there are practical reasons he shouldn't just go around killing people all the time, so he is careful to manipulate his environment such that he can get away with it when he does kill and otherwise maintains impeccable civility. But the fact remains, he pretty much always wants to murder everyone and make wine from their blood. (In fact, he and the other Old Ones d..id that very thing once, yay.) He sees human morality as a hindrance, a cage meant to keep people from achieving their true potential. As he explained it to Cutler, being human was like being born in captivity; he felt he was meant for so much more than the human world would allow. If the freedom to fulfill his potential has to come at the expense of his conscience, so be it. As a vampire, he is intensely ambitious, confident in his abilities, and capable of switching from charm to viciousness with alarming ease. He also has an idle sort of restlessness, like the only reason he's not running everything is because he doesn't quite feel like it just now—and he probably is running mostly everything, anyhow. On the side, he's a sadist, tending toward head games as much as (or more than) physical torture, and he particularly enjoys destroying people's humanity, possibly out of spite for the hideous things he saw human beings were capable of during his own mortal life.

Hal doesn't want to be capable of those things himself, though. Maybe because he saw enough when he was alive, or because he doesn't want to become the kind of man he hated as a youth, or just because he has some vestige of a conscience after all these years. He tells Leo, when he decides to go good, that he wants Leo to believe there's hope, that he can be saved—although the fact that he wants Leo to believe that suggests he may not believe it himself. His personality has always been cyclical, and he honestly doesn't seem convinced that the cycle can be broken. However, while he does arguably set himself up for failure, the fact that he doesn't believe he'll succeed doesn't keep him from trying, even if it doesn't last, because his attempts at reform aren't just about guilt and repentance; they're about being able to stand himself on a daily basis. He just wants to have a life he doesn't hate, for as long as he can.

Currently, Hal is on the wagon, and his outward presentation is a lot less disturbing! He comes off as very posh, but old-fashioned, uptight, and a bit pretentious. "Pompous" might be a better word for it. While he doesn't want to go back to the man he used to be, he clearly has some residual dissatisfaction with his loss of status. (He used to be a lord, and now he's flipping burgers.) He draws a parallel between his mortal life and his life in abstinence from blood when he refers to his home with Leo and Pearl as his "cage." The difference is, that was a cage he'd chosen, to keep himself safe and to keep others safe from him. He may resent its limitations at times the same way he did his mortal life, but he takes pride in his ability to control his addiction, too. He's just a bit shirty as a result.

Hal comes off as emotionally reserved, which is both natural and a side-effect of his constant efforts at self-control. He values self-discipline particularly highly now that small demonstrations thereof are integral to his recovery. However, it makes him seem a bit weird, too. In order to keep himself safe, he maintains an almost religious dedication to routine, keeping himself continuously occupied with mundane tasks, and will typically remove himself from situations where he feels disruptions to his routine are interfering with his ability to fight his addiction. That translates to being fairly intolerant of change and sometimes seeming apathetic to other people's problems. Essentially, if he needs his space, he needs his space, and he doesn't care what kind of crisis you may be having, because he believes the consequences of him slipping up will be worse. Unfortunately, that means making a habit of prioritizing his own feelings and needs over other people's. (Though of course, if he were truly as self-centered as that suggests, he could just be killing everyone instead, so... there's that.) When he feels like he's not in control of his environment and vis-a-vis his cravings, he can be irritable, sarcastic, and generally short-tempered until he finds stability again.

Once Hal has settled into his surroundings, however, he does get more personable. He takes satisfaction in his routine, and when he's in a good mood, he looks for ways to not just keep his mind occupied but to be helpful to other people. His silly side rears its head only rarely for impromptu karaoke, but that does exist as well. He can be friendly, even downright perky, in the right situation. With people he can tolerate (and who can tolerate him) for long enough, he's been known to build strong bonds of friendship and demonstrate incredible loyalty, and with humanity more generally, he does feel a certain protective urge. He just requires quite a bit of stability for that side of himself to shine through, because otherwise he expends most of his energy just managing his condition.

Object: His set of dominos, with Leo's instructions for his care attached. (That is, keep him away from people, small dogs, budgies, blood, and Kia-Ora.)

Reason for playing: IDKKKK I love his face. What BH does best, for me, is the "absurd mundanity" thing in the midst of all manner of supernatural craziness, so I'd mostly like Hal to fuss about on the network, get a menial job, try to establish some stability, and do what he does to try to manage his condition. Being in an environment where there are options for blood-drinkers that don't involve murder would be an interesting dilemma for him. Also, having the opportunity to be around a lot of supernaturals would be both good and bad, in that he tends to be tempted back toward the dark side when he's around other vampires, but being around supernaturals in general is what helps him manage his urges, since that gives him the chance to form bonds with people he can't drink from. And, despite the fact that he's an ancient, sometimes-murderous sociopath, he's more adaptable to low-key banter/slice-of-life rp than the rest of my cast, which is something I desire a little more of. I'm anticipating he'll be a little difficult to integrate into Baedal due to his isolationism, but I'm hoping that making him That Guy Who Never Leaves the Inn will open up some opportunities for CR with new arrivals, and eventually I'd like him to get a job that forces him to interact with people.

Gods: Ruun, Kavan, or Shada. Ruun because writing and quiet are big parts of how he manages his condition, literature in particular is something he enjoys, and he is very much the educated aesthete type. Kavan because efficiency and control are also incredibly important to Hal in managing his condition (although technology is his enemy). Shada b...ecause when he falls off the wagon, his appetites are primarily carnal. (Shada might dislike him, actually, considering how his womanizing typically ends for the woman in question, but that side of him is certainly under her purview.)

Writing Samples
Third-Person Arrival Post:
When he opens his eyes to the green tiled arrival room, the first clear thought to enter his mind is: I'm free.

It's instinct. He'd been strapped to that chair for weeks, with Tom and Alex standing guard over his recovery—watching his every move, ignoring his curses and pleas, forcing him to watch Top Gear—it had been positively inhumane, in his opinion, or at least in his opinion for the first fortnight, until his head began to clear for any appreciable length of time, until the burning under his skin subsided long enough for him to acknowledge what they were doing as kindness. But knowing that doesn't stop him from rushing the door, pressing his fingers to the crack to try to pry it open, and slamming his palm against it when that fails.

What stops him is the set of dominoes on the table. Smooth, white, clean, and perfectly aligned in their box, just as he'd left them, with a note affixed to the top in Leo's handwriting, not where he'd left it. He reaches out, runs a thumb across the old ink, lets it rest against the cool plastic and nods once. Twice.

Taking one domino in hand, he steps back and takes in his surroundings—the atrocious tile, DON'T PANIC scratched into the wall. By the time he finishes the pamphlet he's flipping the domino between his fingers rapidly, and if his hand is shaking, if his eyes take on that slight sheen of dread, surely that can be excused by the fact that he's just been unceremoniously ripped from everything he knows.

Or the fact that he's on his own. He's on his own for five seconds, and already he would have slipped if he could.

He's not ready to do this alone.


First-Person Network Post:

Hello?

[ The voice on the other end is soft-spoken, gentlemanly, with a distinctly posh English accent. On first listen, it might sound cool and collected, but there's an undercurrent that is decidedly less so. When there is no immediate response, he continues: ]

I'm– not certain if this is working or who I am telephoning, but I believe there has been some kind of mistake.

I need to go back. Now.

[ That doesn't sound like a request. ]


First-Person Journal Post:
6:00 AM: 150 Press-Ups
6:18 AM: 300 Sit-Ups
6:40 AM: 5 Laps Around Inn
7:00 AM: Bathe
7:30 AM: Breakfast
8:00 AM: SMB Radio 2
9:00 AM: Read Newspaper (Sample local options to start.)
9:45 AM: Laundry and Ironing (If able, obtain spare clothes.)
11:00AM: Poetry
11:30AM: Lunch
12:10PM: Peruse Library
1:00 PM: Dominoes
2:00 PM: Afternoon Tea
2:30 PM: SMB Radio 1
3:00 PM: Embroidery (Obtain needle, thread, cloth, and hoop.)
4:00 PM: Origami (Obtain paper, investigate new guides.)
5:00 PM: 50 Biceps Curls (Obtain heavy object of some kind.)
5:20 PM: 5 Laps Around Inn
5:40 PM: Wash Up
5:00 PM: Tidy Up Room
5:30 PM: SMB Radio 2
6:30 PM: Dinner
8:00 PM: Quiet Reading
10:00PM: Sleep

Third-Person Action Post: Skipped!