Dr. Henry Ramsey

[Dr. Henry Ramsey]

The Basics

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Name: Dr. Henry Rafael Ramsey
Nicknames: Mr. Kicks
Age: 62
Orientation: Bisexual
Desired Rank/Job: Cognitive behavioral therapist/Hypnotherapist (school therapist position--PhD is in Rhetoric)
Powers:
Hypnotic voice: With some concentration, Henry's voice can cause those who hear it to fall into a hypnotic trance. In this state, the mind is highly suggestible--inhibitions lower and the barriers separating the conscious and subconscious mind are thinned. Used at lower levels, the voice has a mild soporific effect similar to a sedative, causing a sense of calm in the listener. Those with better trained minds find it easier to resist the effects of his voice, but with a strong enough effort of will anyone could break free from it (let's be honest now, would you really want to?). This power has the unusual side effect of making the user somewhat suggestible himself for brief periods of time after use. The more he uses it, the stronger the effect.

Sonokinesis: The manipulation of sound waves, altering the pitch, volume, tone, and path of the sound. This ability can't be used at the same time as his other power, and it has such severe side effects that he doesn't care to use it much. Something about handling all of those vibrations causes joint pain, migraines, and a very high pitched ringing in his ears.


Play By: Morgan Freeman

The Details

Hair Color: Used to be solid black, now salt and pepper (emphasis on the salt)
Eye Color: Very dark brown
Any Piercings? Wears an earring in his left ear.
Any Tattoos? None
Any Scars? There are a number of thin white scars covering his hands and fingers.
General Appearance: Thanks to his half-Cuban heritage, Henry's skin is fairly light, for a black man. His cheeks are dusted with dark freckles, and his face is so expressive and full of character as to render good looks unnecessary. There's almost always a small smile hovering around his lips, which his daughter finds both charming and infuriating, because it's difficult to tell what he's actually thinking.

He's not exceptionally tall, standing at 5'11", and he's begun to develop a slight paunch, but he's not fat by any means. He tends to dress stylishly but plainly, usually wearing the same black turtlenecks under different darkly colored jackets, but if he finds something funny enough, he'll wear it just for kicks. This can range from novelty t-shirts to fake monocles.
Personality: Henry Ramsey is something of a riddle to himself--possibly the only puzzle he has no interest in solving. Really, for such an intelligent and articulate man, he can never seem to shake the habit of doing and saying very unwise things in his personal life. He attends therapy for PTSD and Major Depression, but he makes extremely slow progress. Some might find it ironic that a skilled therapist would make for such a stubborn, intractable patient, but it's actually quite common. It's as if he believes that solving the rest of humanity's problems will heal his own by osmosis.

Humor, avoidance, and denial are Henry's go-to coping strategies, in precisely that order. The world is a grand, twisted joke to him, and he's continually surprised that no one else seems to see the punchlines all around them. Like many who are drawn to drug use, Henry is something of a risk taker, and he tries to keep himself entertained as a strategy to preserve his sobriety. Reading, building, solving, playing music--it doesn't much matter what it is, as long as it can hold his attention for a while. People, of course, are the best puzzles of all, and he tends to throw himself into work when one of his depressive episodes hits and leeches the joy from his usual hobbies.

He's charming, in a haphazard way, but he has a habit of making enemies with his recklessness, caustic wit, and general disregard for the social contract. Still, he makes more friends than enemies, and those friends can count on as much love and loyalty as mischief. He hasn't had a girl or boyfriend since his wife's accident, and resists any romantic entanglements. He tends to become selectively deaf on the subject of his wedding ring. For most, getting into an argument with him isn't a very wise move, because Henry's preferred mode of combat is words at ten paces, and he has the capacity to get very nasty if he feels he's being put on the defensive, and will say things he later regrets. Luckily this is a flaw he recognizes in himself and can at least try to curb the impulse.

Your Vices

Likes:
-Jazz
-Meddling
-Movies
-Puzzles/riddles
-Dancing
-Reading
-Work
-Volunteerism
-Rainy days
-Smoking
Dislikes:
-Getting up early
-Hot weather
-Being told how to behave
-Country music
-Being idle
Strengths:
-Charismatic
-Plays piano and conga drums
-Sings well
-Intelligent
-As patient with others as he is impatient with himself
Weaknesses:
- Frequent insomnia
- Depression, PTSD symptoms
- Recovering addict
-Very severe allergies to fur and feathers
Fears:
-Falling off the wagon
-Visiting his wife
-Deep water
-Never reconciling with his daughter
-Being vulnerable or indebted to anyone
Secret: Whenever he's asked, Henry says that he's a widower. In reality, his wife is very much alive, but in no condition to remember who she is, much less her daughter or husband of 40 years.

Family Ties

Father: David Ramsey (deceased)
Mother: Gracelia Ramsey (deceased)
Siblings: Yolanda Ramsey (65), Joella Rhodes (58), Juan and Phillipe Ramsey (twins, deceased)
Any Other Important People:
Wife: Hazel Ramsey (66)
Daughter: Delia Ramsey (32)
Pets: Henry is very allergic to dogs and cats, so he has three African Pygmy Hedgehogs (Prometheus, Pandora, and The Fonz--aged four years, two years, and ten weeks respectively) and one of those hairless Spynx cats (affectionately named Ugly, four years old)

History

Back when ragtime had run itself into the ground but jazz still remembered it was the devil's music, David Ramsey was a big name in the Harlem music scene. His venue, Sin and Soul, was modest in size, but he packed it to the rafters with the talent he booked there. His children spent most of their evenings working there in one capacity or another, but only Henry, the oldest of their sons, was ever allowed to go up on stage.

The boy simply had a voice that couldn't be denied, even from a young age, and he was as passionate about the music as his parents were. What's more, he was starting to become a draw in his own right, something of a neighborhood fixture. Sure, it was a fame limited to three city blocks or so, but it was more than enough for Henry. Theirs was a family of love and life and jazz, but they had their flaws.

The best way to describe David and Gracelia's parenting style would be benign neglect. Their children were never wanted for anything, including love, but they were highly inattentive when it came to the day to day goings on of their progeny. In their neighborhood, with the wild crowd Sin and Soul attracted by the dozens, this was often a recipe for disaster. Henry and his older sister, Yolanda, picked up what slack they could, becoming more responsible for their siblings out of necessity.

Juan and Phillipe, the twins, were his greatest source of worry. They liked to drift into the VIP section and rub elbows with the rich people, but this was the heart of Spanish Harlem; realistically, almost anybody who had money was a pimp, a dealer, a gangster, or an unsavory combination of the three.

When Henry was sixteen, his powers manifested. He was in the middle of dish washing, his least favorite chore under the sun, watching the tiny tv his parents had recently installed in the kitchen. It was a rerun, but it was a good one, so he didn't mind in the least. When Nat King Cole and Harry Belafonte stepped on stage, Henry sang right along with them.

About halfway through, he realized that everything around him had fallen strangely silent except for the sound of food sizzling on the grill. It was a blessing that the Hammel recruiter arrived within a couple of days, or half of the kitchen staff would have been out of work for no good reason. It seemed that Henry had accidentally entranced his coworkers, and when he reached the line, "Shut your mouth, go away," they had taken it as a literal suggestion and removed themselves from the premises.

Henry was relieved to get away from it all, and once he was given the opportunity to focus on his education without distractions, he discovered how much he enjoyed learning. For the first time, life was predictable and relatively easy, but growing confusion about his sexual orientation plunged Henry into a deep state of depression.

He had uncomfortable feelings for his male roommate, but he was just as attracted to Hazel Abrhams, the gorgeous pyrokinetic girl who ran the debate club. He didn't know what to do about it, so he withdrew from everyone, spending most of his time brooding in the library. He was afraid to go to anyone to discuss these odd feelings inside of him, because he'd grown up with the same opinions everyone else around him seemed to hold on the subject--homo and bisexuality were sinful and worst and a form of mental illness at best.

Things only got worse when he left school and returned to his family in Harlem. He graduated from Hammel in 1967, and the temptations that had seemed so black and white to his sixteen year old self took on a new face entirely. He decided that any vice was worth trying at least once, and for a young man with his connections, charisma, and musical talent, there were a lot of options on the menu. His life was a blur for three or four years during which he, Juan, and Phillipe were inseparable (and insufferable, if you were to ask those who had to be around them too often).

One night, Henry was feeling sick and left the twins to go party without him. The two of them bought what turned out to be a very bad batch of drugs. Yolanda was the one who found them and called the ambulance in the morning. Juan was dead before the ambulance got there--Philipe held on for almost a day. Their loss struck the Ramsey family hard, and each reacted according to their own nature. For Henry, this took the shape of one last insane bender closely followed by a long stint in rehab.

It was pure misery, but one miraculous fact made it all worthwhile--no less personage than Hazel Abrhams was working there as an intern. He hadn't seen her since their Hammel days, but he certainly hadn't forgotten her. Having become much more comfortable with his sexuality in the intervening years, he was no longer stricken with panic at the sight of her, and he made it his life's mission to woo her. There were plenty of obstacles, not the least of which being her engagement to some bland idiot from her hometown, but there was this little spark of interest in her eyes which kept him hopeful. Eventually, his patience and persistence won the day.

So began the happiest days of his life: they moved to Maine, he enrolled in college, Hazel received her doctorate and started her residency, and the two eventually bowed to the inevitable and married. When little Delia was born, Henry was working his own internship, and the good times seemed fated to last forever.

Hazel had been experiencing some sharp leg pain, but both of them attributed that to a strained muscle. Unfortunately, it was actually a series of blood clots, and the pain she felt was from the increasing pressure as the heart continued to pump blood toward the blockages.

Those clots (or pulmonary emboli) were a ticking time bomb, and when things finally went wrong, it was in a big way. One of the clots broke free under the pressure and caused her to have a severe stroke. Then she lost control of her pyrokinesis and all hell broke loose. Henry got Delia outside first and put her in the car to protect her from the cold, then went back for his wife.

She'd been sitting at the piano, and the front legs had collapsed, pinning her to the bench. It was like being trapped inside of a nightmare. He knew that there was a limit to how long Hazel could tolerate direct contact with flames, and the piano was burning hotter by the second. All he could think to do was try to get at her through the top of the piano, tearing impotently at the strings inside. He accomplished nothing but to slice his hands up, but the firemen arrived in time to extract her before any fatal damage was caused.

When she woke up, they found her memory and motor skills were profoundly affected. Hazel didn't know him or Delia--Hazel didn't even remember she was Hazel. For everyone's safety, she was sent to a nursing home in Pilot Ridge, where the staff were used to dealing with mentally compromised metahumans.

It was all simply too much. He fell off the wagon for a few years, and by the time he found his way back on his daughter was already a teenager, and far closer to her maternal grandparents than her father. Henry tried to bridge the gap, but the years he missed were very important years, and they both knew it. When he eventually stopped visiting Hazel, Delia stopped speaking to him entirely. He hopes she's well.

Henry threw himself into his work in order to cope, eventually setting up his own practice and building a very respectable professional reputation. He's been working at Hammel for about seven and a half school years, and he loves his job. He's good at it, and it's work badly in need of doing. He also frequently volunteers with the local jazz station under the name of "Mr. Kicks and eats his way through books as if he actually needed them to live. In a way, he does: the choice is stay occupied or spend time with flashbacks and regrets.

Roleplay Example

Ugly had been up and about for at least a few hours, and as such he couldn't fathom what his worthless owner could be doing still lying in bed. The hairless cat was intent on breakfast, and until he figured out how to break through the cunning cat-proof devices in the hedgehog room, he was dependent on the idiot. Hopping up onto the bed, Ugly took a moment to look aristocratically down at the man before gnawing delicately on his eyebrow.

Henry Ramsey sat bolt upright in bed, flailing. When he realized what had roused him twenty minutes before his alarm was set to go off, he glared at the cat, who stared back with level amusement in his green eyes. Finally, Henry lost the staring contest, dragging himself out of bed and obediently shuffling down to the kitchen, but he wasn't happy about it.

"Lousy animal," he muttered resentfully, "It's like living with a Bond villain."

It was just as well that the cat chose this morning to get Henry up early, because it meant he was dressed and all of the animals had been tended to when the newspaper hit his front door. As was his tradition, Henry didn't bring the paper in, he went outside to read it on the porch with his coffee and his tobacco pipe. When he heard the first shock wave, he instinctively looked toward Hammel. Sure enough, there was a smallish cloud of--smoke? Dust?-- rising in the distance.

His phone started ringing less than five minutes later, but Henry didn't bother to answer it; that would have required taking his hands from the wheel. He was already on his way, having a fairly good guess about which child was at the center of the disturbance. Henry only hoped that someone had managed to stop the boy before he did anything--drastic.

It was lucky that Henry didn't pass any cops on the drive over, because he was speeding the whole way, a cold sweat on his brow. He didn't talk to his daughter anymore, and he'd been absent for much of her childhood, so the children of Hammel were even more important to him, and this one had been hurting for a very long time.

What About You?

Name: Java
Age: 21
Experience: Off and on for eight years or so. Crap, now I feel old. XD
How Did You Find Us? RPG-D
Ready To Play? Aye!

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[Admin!]

Accepted.

What a fun application! Welcome to Hammel, now all you have to do is hit up our claims.