ESSENTIALS Name:
Nickname: Jones, Jonesy
Age and Birth Date: 19, March 28
Occupation: Floater
APPEARANCE Jonesy is tall and thin; the fact is, he looks kind of unfinished, his fingers too long and his height too much for the width of his shoulders. His face is narrow, with a sharply pointed chin. It makes his eyes look large, and with the right expression, sad. His hair is black, cut short on the sides and just long enough on top to fall into his face. His eyes are blue.
He likes shirts with long sleeves and narrow cuffs, or t-shirts and arm-warmers in eclectic color combinations, jeans or khakis that do not bag and have many pockets, and soft-soled sneakers. He loves jewelry, but not to wear it, and has a number of mismatched diamond stud earrings in each ear, all the way up and along the helix.
PERSONALITY Jonesy is one of those rare people that has enough book smarts to balance his common sense. The problem is that he doesn't always follow what he
ought to do, as outlined by those. He likes close fitting clothes, heat, and jewelry. He dislikes touchy people, smokers, serious relationships, and people talking about their feelings.
He'd be most at home in a place where everyone knows everyone else casually, but doesn't poke their noses into other people's business. The kind of place where you could go missing for a couple of days and when you show up again, the people just nod and smile and don't ask you where you've been and if you're okay and what have you been doing and all those annoying questions that he just never knows how to answer.
Jonesy comes off as nervy in a general sort of way; calling him a long tailed cat trapped in a room full of rocking chairs wouldn't be far off the mark. When he gets truly stressed, things start to disappear. Not literally, but anything shiny and relatively valuable within reach of him will go into his pockets. He doesn't mean to do it, his fingers just find the shinies irresistible.
ABILITIES He's not strong, but he's quick. He doesn't like to fight, so when he's cornered, his only goal is to escape. That means that Jonesy fights dirty. He won't hesitate to go for the eyes, box someone's ears, dislocate kneecaps, or go for the balls or breasts. Nothing is off limits.
He doesn't like violence; he can't really take a hit, and blood is gross. Jonesy doesn't even like fighting verbally; if cowardice and inattention will get him out of it, he'll duck his head and give sad eyes and cower.
In social situations, it's not that he's not empathic. It's that he's afraid to show it. If he does, what's to say the person won't want more from him than he's willing to give? Better not to start down that path at all. It makes him seem a little stand-offish, maybe even shy, but once you get a little past that outer layer (no one gets very far in) he's a great sounding board, giving emotionally neutral and well-thought out responses to problems.
HOBBIES Jonesy likes to read, when he can, almost whatever he can get his hands on. He likes movies, though romcoms turn his stomach, and he can talk jewelry with girls like you wouldn't believe. He likes gemstones, especially brilliant cut ones, and can tell the grade and carat of a diamond just by looking at it. He calls it a hobby. It's more like an obsession. He's also startlingly good at applying makeup.
HISTORY He doesn't talk about it. It probably has something to do with his name, which may or may not be an alias, and the fact that he has no where to go to, which he also doesn't talk about. If he has family, well, he doesn't talk about that, either, or whether or not he's a native of Irnsquare.
All that he'll confirm is that Jones is not actually his name, he may or may not have graduated from the high school on the wrong side of the tracks, and he won't go back. What's clear is that somewhere along the way he met a few people:
Amy: Sixth grade, or thereabouts, she's probably the only girl he's ever liked
that way. She might be blond or brunette or a redhead – regardless, she was a girl, she was older than he was, and she liked makeup. He learned it from her.
Amy's Mom: No other name, she was a single mother who welcomed him into her home. She worked at a jewelry store; on school holidays, she took them both with her. They learned about clarity and carats and sizes and shapes there; he and Amy used to make a game of guessing carat sizes and materials, with sweets for whoever was closest.
Corbie: No, that's probably not really his name either, but he's definitely the one who started Jonesy down the path he's on at the moment. Some time after he ran away but before he found Doors, Corbie found
him. And Corbie wasn't a bad man; there was no molestation, no grab a**, none of the stuff you'd expect from a grown guy scoping the streets for kids. He taught Jonesy some of what makes his hands so graceful; a little pick pocketing, a little burglary, a little of how to hit someone to make sure they can't chase you. Jonesy may or may not have picked his name there; he doesn't talk about that, either.
The Change TOUCHED APPEARANCE Jonesy started out pale. But now he has cow spots; if you've ever seen a black and white cow-pattern on a cat, you've got the right the idea. The fact is, his once black hair is now black and white (but mostly black, except for little asymmetrical white spots. On his skin, it looks a little different; he's gotten paler, and in the places where he has 'spots', his skin really is black.
He's got one large spot on his face that starts in the middle of his forehead and covers most of the left side of his face, covering the bridge of his nose and the left corner of his mouth. He also has a smaller spot that covers part of his chin and the right side of his jaw, and extends past the collar of his shirt. His right hand is white, with ring and pinkie finger and part of the back of it black, and his left hand is mostly black, except for part of his palm.
Where his eyes were blue, now they're light sensitive and reflect green or gold. Unfortunately, as yet he has no claws, no whiskers, and none of the other neat things that cats have.
MAGIC Jonesy doesn't think it's magic, but somehow he can always get to where he wants to go, even if the room is locked. Somehow it unlocks for him. Or maybe it was never locked at all. It's sort of a chicken-egg question, at least when it comes to Jonesy. And while nothing but his hands has ever been very graceful before, sometimes when he's not thinking about it, he can walk on things people aren't supposed to walk on and keep his balance or manage to land on his feet when falling off of it. But only sometimes.
SAMPLE It started out pretty innocuous. He'd been going there for a while and it'd been a rough day. He'd picked something up, pocketed it by accident, and then all of a sudden there was this guy with really big wings and part of his mind was going
holy jesus mother of god at the same time some other part of it is going
but angels don't have brown wings and of course that means the giggles came out and he just couldn't help it, honest. He didn't even mean to pick it up, whatever it was.
But there was this guy with wings and this smile and eyeliner and before he knew it, his skin was itching. Not all over – oh god, that would have driven him crazy – but in patches. And part of it was his hair, too, so as soon as the guy (
with wings his brain chirruped again) let go of the collar of his shirt he went hunting a bathroom to blink nervously into the mirror.
And that was.
Well.
“Cool.”
It wasn't like he wasn't already a freak; nineteen and homeless? Diamond studs in his ears? Aversion to people? Cow spots just meant his outsides matched his freaky insides.
Though, after a moment of blinking at the asymmetrical spots on his skin, he went into a stall and checked down the back of his pants. No tail? Thank god. That would have been awkward.
Once he was done examining the changes, he tucked mismatched hands into his pockets and drifted on the dance floor until he could find the guy with the wings again. He tugged on one sleeve, definitely not daring to so much as look too hard at the wings.
“Don't suppose you've got an opening for me, huh?”
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