application for lastvoyages

[phantommenace]

User Name/Nick: Kris/Pepper
User DW: my_daroga
E-mail: mydaroga [at] gmail
Other Characters: Luke Skywalker

Character Name: Erik
Series: The Phantom of the Opera (Gaston Leroux)
Age: Unknown--probably around 50
From When?: Just prior to dying of love at the end of the novel.


Inmate/Warden: Inmate. Erik is a murder, a sociopath, an inveterate trickster, who considers himself outside humanity. While he believes himself to have been redeemed by Christine's love at the end of the novel, we all know it is not that easy--he has no understanding of what it means to be good. He needs some sort of context to graduate, and needs to feel that he is part of the human (or any) race in order to gain an innate understanding of morality.
Item: N/A

Arrival: Snatched! I don't think even Erik would join a club that would have him...

Abilities/Powers: Erik has no supernatural powers, though he's incredibly intelligent and very strong. He has skills which can look like magic to the observer, including sleight-of-hand and ventriloquism. He does appear somewhat supernatural in the novel, mostly because he's written to be able to do things he probably shouldn't be able to?

Personality: I'm starting with appearance because while not specified on the application, to a great extent it has formed both Erik's history and his personality.

To most, Erik is merely a shadow, if that. If one is unlucky, he is merely a cloaked figure. For the even less fortunate, his yellow eyes are the last thing they see. Erik was, as a boy, exhibited as the Living Corpse and has retained this emaciated state into adulthood. Despite this, he is alarmingly strong, as he stores little fat and what he has is muscle. He is tall, but not unusually so by our standards; something over six feet, but his extreme thinness makes him seem taller. His limbs are slightly longer than average, as are his fingers. His skin has an unhealthy pallor to it and is somewhat mottled.

His face, should anyone be unlucky enough to see it, resembles not so much a skull as a skull with greyed-yellowed skin stretched over it. The cartilage is missing from his nose, which gives him the appearance of having a hole instead. This did not remove his sense of smell, but has compromised it over the years due to lack of protection of the cilia and olfactory nerve. His ears also show some signs of this cartilage lack, though it is not a generalized condition. His eyes are sunken, and appear black and bottomless in the light but yellow in the dark. His mouth is nearly lipless. Altogether the effect is strikingly corpse-like, made all the worse for the face being animated.

Erik's habitual attire is evening dress, whatever the time of day. He is typically careful with his clothing, and has his measurements on file with a discrete tailor. However, he is also capable of neglecting his appearance entirely while preoccupied with other matters. He does, however, keep his fingernails blunt for musical purposes. Because of the underground conditions, combined with his periodic neglect of his person and diminished sense of smell, Erik can smell unpleasantly like a combination of must and body odor. When out and about, Erik is wrapped in cloak, mask and hat all in black. On the occasions when he must go above-ground, such as for provisions, Erik has a false nose which he wears with glasses, though he keeps his face in the shadows as much as possible. He also has a flare for the dramatic, as witnessed in his Red Death costume. On those historic occasions when he revealed himself to the denizens of the opera (the managers' dinner, the Bal Masque) it was his own face he wore.

It is difficult to find one word to describe Erik's personality. Erik is changeable, though his behavior can be predicted in specific cases. Of primary importance is his absolute divorce from humanity; he considers himself, alternately, both entirely above and entirely below mankind. Erik also walks a strange boundary between society and utter lack of it, which is to say that while he considers himself above civilization, he desperately resents the fact he cannot be part of it. He has absorbed many of the desires, opinions and habits of civilized man, but they manifest in his own way.

At his core, Erik is highly intelligent, curious, voracious when it comes to knowledge and experience, and full of intense emotions. His genius is not just in music--he's also mechanically minded and capable of engineering and invention (not actually all that unrelated to music, in a sense). He's very good at solving these little problems, less so at the bigger picture of where it's all going or how it will be used--he tends to ignore that either because he has no control over it or because, of late, it doesn't seem relevant if it affects the human race from which he considers himself separate.

This intelligence expresses itself in a certain superiority. It's hard to divorce this from his general alienation from humanity, however--it's both cause and effect. Without the intelligence, he might have stayed hidden away at home, unaware of what he was missing or the unfairness of his situation. Instead, he's keenly aware of every difference and every slight, and able do do something about it. Unfortunately, all he can really do is lash out, creating problems for those around him because he thinks it's the only way to get what he wants. Circumstance cut him off from his fellow man, but his genius has allowed him to shore up that division with his own walls.

Therefore, Erik is constantly battling between his middle-class ambitions (wife, home, opera) and his conviction that he is either a god or a monster. This manifests in his home, absurdly pedestrian in many details but lodged deep within the earth and containing, apart from the torture chamber, other mysterious wonders. It manifests in his dress and manners, sometimes courtly in the extreme but often nearly animalistic--and always exaggerated. He professes a desire to live among men but does not mimic them well. He has, at this point, been below for so long that he is almost a caricature of a gentleman, with no real knowledge of how people behave. Anyone reading this will wonder how he might have fulfilled his promises to Christine to live as normal people do, should she have stayed with him, and they are quite right to. Erik himself is not aware of this lack, for he long ago ceased to view himself from any exterior vantage point as a matter of self-preservation.

Erik has no moral compass save for that which coincides with his own self-interest or, on rare occasions, his feelings for others who manage to transcend his generalized hatred of humanity. He is aware of what men believe are right and wrong, but only intellectually and it does not apply to him. He is capable, however, of wishing himself good, and of believing he might be given the chance--but it is an abstract goal, and he does not follow through as far as altering his behavior.

His emotions, which run hot and swing from elation (at solving problems, creating, etc) to anger (he's got a quick temper) to despair (dramatically crying or professing his own death due to his broken heart), might have been tempered some by society had he been able to join it. Instead, he's a law unto himself and left to his own devices, they find expression in healthy and unhealthy ways. He does not think the rules apply to him, and this goes for his emotional expression, as well--he might spend days composing without eating, or decide to haunt the opera on a whim. He might spend a pleasant day with Christine singing and taking her for walks, or he might declare that if she doesn't agree to marry him, he's going to blow up the entire opera house with everyone in it.

Erik is loyal to very little, and has little fellow feeling, but he is capable of it--almost in spite of himself. He does not intend to fall for Christine. He does not intend to have a friend in the daroga. However, that part of him that longs for contact worms its way out, and then keeps him from rejecting it outright. At the same time, his poor socialization and his lack of moral compass mean that he's terrible at acting on either of these alliances in a healthy manner. To truly understand friendship or loyalty, he would have to accept that he is an equal to other people, rather than somehow both above and below them.

Sexually, Erik is a virgin; I could see circumstances where he might have paid for sex but he hasn't bothered. He's not asexual, but he is convinced that he is repulsive, holding the same views he rails against. And there have always been more important things to do than paying someone to try to pretend not to want to throw up.

Born today, with medical advances and a more tolerant (I hope) society, Erik might still have been an eccentric. The inventor's mind and the artistic temperament would still be present, and would definitely manifest in a certain arrogance and hot-headedness. I do think that these could have been tempered by social and emotional intelligence, none of which he really was forced to learn. By this point in his life, there's a tinge of madness there, too, though I think that is born of long isolation and abuse rather than necessarily a chemical imbalance or other issue, though that may be something to explore.

Erik is capable of being pleasant, of holding conversations and being entertaining and sweet--when he wants to. More often, however, he has either been left alone or attacked, or abused, which means that he is generally exercising only certain parts of his personality. There is a pull within him to be accepted, but an ingrained fear of rejection that he has already assumed has taken place. Thus, this part of his personality may be some time in uncovering on the Barge, but his innate need for acceptance will gradually take over. His intelligence and rejection of humanity (who, he thinks, rejected him first) will be initially most prominent, and will alternate between anger and resentment.

Barge Reactions: Coming to the barge, Erik will be reluctant. Though his native curiosity will take over when he realizes there are worlds and technologies out there he has not yet conquered, he will attempt to seclude himself as he is used to being regarded as a monster and freak. It will take some doing to get him outside himself, but access to art, technology, and ideas will spur that interest. Floods and breaches will likely result in momentary set-backs, as he will resent the intrusion.

He will, initially, still hold himself entirely apart, though I think that when he learns that humans are not the only people here it may begin to chip away at his view of humanity. And his place in it. At the same time, while he himself is a victim of this, he will have antiquated notions that may shade into ableism and racist tropes.


Path to Redemption: Since Erik has been reached by Christine Daae already, he believes himself to be redeemed. This complicates matters, obviously, both in and out of character. The issue, I think, is that Erik has no concept of right or wrong, or of humanity's or society's expectations. So he will believe that "love" has made him good--but will need to learn not only how to be good, but that love doesn't have that sort of transformative power. Not automatically, anyway.

Basically, Erik needs to be made to feel part of the human race again. Hideously ugly, he's been hounded all his life--he believes that "if I am evil, it is man's hatred that has made me so." If he were to be made to believe that mankind accepted him, that he could be seen for himself (and as a man) not just by one woman but by society, his need to belong would take over.

Triggers/likes would include music, scientific invention, travel, and, at its most basic level, human interaction that is neither persecution nor victimhood. That is to say, Erik is used to people hating him, fearing him, or both. He will eventually have to reconcile normal human interaction with what he "knows" of the world. It may also be interesting to have him come to terms with the idea that there are races other than human--it may serve to put things into perspective for him and his feelings of exclusion.

History: Much of Erik's known history is drawn from Gaston Leroux's research as presented in the novel, though I've filled some in as his information is sketchy. Erik was born near Rouen, the son of a mason. His parents were middle-class, his father better-off than his own parents though his mother had married down slightly, both out of infatuation with Erik's handsome father and the (correct) expectation that he would soon be a success. He recalls his parents as handsome, distant people except when his mother became angry, as she often did on what seemed to the young Erik like a whim. Nearly any action he performed could be punished, and it was always Mother who carried out such. His father remained aloof and remote, generally visible only from a distance as Erik was restricted to certain parts of the house so as not to disturb him. Erik did, however, hear his father play the violin from time to time, though he did not play exceptionally well. He left home too early to be aware of this, but his father blamed his mother for the boy's condition, and relations rapidly deteriorated between them. They maintained a front of a marriage, but kept to their own quarters except before company. By this time, they were well to do enough that their house could accommodate such an arrangement. His father saw Erik only once, just after he was born, and henceforth had nothing more to do with him.

Erik fled from home around the age of eight, after having learned all he could from his father's library (into which he snuck until caught fondling the violin). Unprepared for the world outside, he was nonetheless already predisposed to consider humanity a separate species from himself, and therefore considered any means of survival appropriate. He lived for some little time like a pariah dog, stealing food and taking what he could, until he fell in with a band of Roma who lived up to their reputation and taught him new ways to steal as well as the herblore and magic of their people. He also procured his first violin at this time. He also began to be shown as "The Living Corpse." While never trusted, Erik was not imprisoned, though he sometimes allowed the public to believe he was for the hint of danger it provided. The indignity of this grated on him, but he also learned the value of terror, of misdirection, of defied expectation. Soon he was on his own again, traveling Europe as he wished, following the fairs but also seeking the centers of learning. While he could not gain formal admittance to any school, Erik nonetheless used his ability to gain entry to any building and creep silently to make his own course of study. As such, it was erratic and very much according to his whim at the time. He watched others at work, as well. Soon his income from the fairs was going into his own experiments and research, which fed back into his act until his other talents were impressive enough that he was able to perform masked but for the denouement of every performance, when he would reveal his face to the shocked crowd. At times, in his youthful arrogance, he even enjoyed this act as he was rapidly becoming convinced of his own superiority and took their foolish, slack-jawed faces as further proof of his status as something apart from Man. He was also honing his craft as a musician, listening where he could and likewise receiving an eclectic education.

At the full flower of his arts of legerdemain and music, Erik was "discovered" at Nijni-Novgorod and summoned to the court of the Shah of Persia, where he encountered a man known in Leroux only as "the daroga" or "the Persian." His talents were put to darker use by the little sultana and the shah, and Erik committed horrors there that one quails to repeat. He performed all such acts without a hint of remorse, and the sultana's mad delight only fueled his own megalomania. The rest, Leroux relates: Erik was ordered killed, escaped due to the daroga's intervention, traveled Asia, and in the 1860's returned to France where he participated in the building of the Palais Garnier. Tired of bloodshed (there are only so many ways a man might die), music was, by now, his all-consuming passion and he conceived of a life he might lead ensconced in its temple. He was to find, of course, that the temple was more appropriately dedicated to Mammon, which may have contributed in some respect to his infatuation with Christine Daae and the purity of her gift.

In the novel, Erik hears a young Swedish ingenue, Christine Daae, singing and offers her lessons despite his need to stay hidden. Christine is a bit touched (my personal view is that her father was well-meaning but a bit childlike and kept her far too sheltered--his death plunged her into a real world she simply wasn't equipped to handle) and perceives his disembodied voice as the "Angel of Music" her father always told her about, sent from Heaven. Erik goes along with this, thinking he can simply teach her and own her talent and her soul. He is soon not content with that, and begins to believe he can have all of her, but he's about the most inept person you can imagine at relationships. He plays on her weaknesses, and eventually (when threatened by the presence of another, handsome suitor) kidnaps her. She learns who he is, and is simultaneously filled with revulsion and pity. This goes on for a bit, with things basically spiraling out of control, until events reach a head and Christine is forced to make a choice. She chooses to stay with Erik and save her boyfriend, which act transforms Erik's bitterness. He lets them both go and dies of love (or whatever) after finally experiencing her tears on his behalf.

Sample Journal Entry: [text]

IT HAS COME TO ERIK'S ATTENTION THAT SOME OF WHAT THE CAPTORS AND EVEN SOME OF THE CAPTIVES HERE HAVE BEEN ALLOWING TO POLLUTE OUR COMMON AREAS HAS COLLOQUIALLY BEEN COME TO BE KNOWN AS 'MUSIC.'

LET ME ASSURE YOU THAT AS AN EXPERT IN THIS FIELD, MOST OF WHAT ERIK HAS HEARD CANNOT IN GOOD CONSCIENCE BE TERMED AS SUCH, AND HE REQUESTS FORTHWITH THAT YOU CEASE. ANYONE FOUND TO BE PLAYING SUCH DRIVEL WHERE ERIK CAN HEAR IT WILL BE SUBJECT TO A FINE OF 10,000 FRANCS OR THE LOCAL EQUIVALENT, OR FACE MY CONSIDERABLE WRATH.

SHOULD YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS ABOUT VARIOUS SPECIFIC PIECES, SO CALLED, PLEASE ADDRESS THEM TO MY ATTENTION HERE.

Sample RP: It is no life for a recluse.

For a time, Erik keeps to his cabin, resisting hunger and taking care of bodily functions in as hygienic a way he can with what he has in his room. But eventually even he cannot stand it, and he must venture out.

He wraps himself up in not just formal wear but his deepest cloak, a scarf over the lower half of his mask, hat pulled down over his brow. And he makes his rounds, squinting at the bright lights overhead as he tries to avoid being seen by any. He has things to do: primarily, to dump the contents of his makeshift chamber pot and collect such foodstuffs as he can without detection. This does not go as planned.

For one thing, there are people about. Everywhere. He does not know whether they are wardens or inmates, but has no wish to be detained on his errands. He is used to shadows, and there are precious few here. The mess hall is easy enough to find, but food that is tinned or dried, portable, is nowhere apparent at first glance. It must be said that the entire exercise is one of, well, lurking.

By a tall man in electric light, looking for all the world like he has escaped from some kind of cheap AIP horror and wandered onto the wrong set.

It is increasingly frustrating, this inability to move unhindered, to procure his needs without interaction, and Erik's mood sours irretrievably before the end of the expedition, as irritation combine with days of denying himself food until he stalks up to the serving area, snatching three plates and balanced them as best he can as he stalks back to his room.


Special Notes: I will be playing Erik mostly from Leroux's novel, but there may be some slide due to the rather cardboard nature of his characterization, holes in background, and, frankly, the wide variety of canon material that may have seeped in over a few decades of fannishness.