Post by Nico Dahl on Apr 5, 2011 19:42:44 GMT -5
[/i][/size][/right]The Basics
Name: Nico "Nintendo" Dahl
Nicknames: Nintendo, Nin, Ninnyhammer, etc. He doesn't respond to Nico and will sit there going "Huuuu?" during roll call.
Age: 17
Orientation: Bisexual
Desired Rank/Job: Student
Powers:
1. duplication - a copy that corresponds to an original exactly; "he made a duplicate for the files"
2. duplication - the act of copying or making a duplicate (or duplicates) of something; "this kind of duplication is wasteful"
Nintendo can make doubles of himself. 'Can' being the operative word, because he doesn't really control when it happens. They function as he would and are essentially extensions of himself; they tend to want the same things as he does and will often just settle to mundane tasks like eating and socializing and harassing things.
While this could have incredible benefit as he could absorb more information/experience if there were three of him and turn his hobbies into supertalents, his brain has yet to figure out how to sort through everything; it's having a hard enough time trying to piece together memories that happened at the same time at different places and different scenarios. His recollection of things jumps around and can be entirely nonsensical at times when his mind clips in a duplicate partying instead of the studying he did last night (which is an endeavor in vain anyway, Nin's not especially bright in most things), and then poof, there goes everything he knew about The Great Gatsby. His entire memory of a situation will have some Ctrl+c'd information right in the middle of it if he's duplicated that day. Technically, it IS something that did happen, but it's kind of traumatizing to have memories of something you didn't actually do but still have it attached to your name and reputation. It's bad enough that he has to take responsibility for the multitude of stupid things he does on his own, much less two-to-five other exact replicas of himself who ALSO know that he should be doing homework and don't want to either.
Technically, they're just harmless and mostly annoying identical teenagers and don't pose too much of a threat to life or limb to anyone, but if you get enough of them in a room there's probably going to be trouble. They like to gang up. Nin is unable to force them to do anything yet and they tend to behave independently unless he bribes them (which isn't really that bad because it's technically himself anyway), although he's learned that if they seem to be in a good mood, they respond well to yelling.
It's really a rather confusing scenario for everyone involved, honestly.
He is able to control when he reabsorbs his duplicates and doesn't necessarily have to wait around for them to weaken up and come home, as long as they don't run off. Which they tend to do. Like chickens with their heads cut off. All. The. Time.
Play By: Andrej Pejic
The Details
Hair Color: Blond, naturally brown
Eye Color: Dark green
Any Piercings? N/A
Any Tattoos? N/A
Any Scars? He's got a long one down the left side of his forearm, about three inches in length, from when he fell from a tree and snapped it in half. His arm, not the tree. NO WORRIES PEOPLE, THE TREE WAS FINE.
General Appearance: For the most part, Nin has a well-proportioned face, with wide cheekbones and a short chin. His right eye is slightly smaller than the left, which is his complaint of choice whenever someone in the general vicinity is grousing about their flaws; they're green (his eyes, not the complainers) and very round, and usually playing their assigned roles in his multitudes of very, very stupid expressions. Nine times out of ten, his hair could do with a brushing, and his roots are glaringly obvious. There's no attempt made to hide the fact that he's naturally a brunette, although he'll usually deny it for the sake of denying it - I mean, his eyebrows are like DARK BROWN. And considering his eyebrows are also FREAKING HUGE, yeah, they're kind of the sort of thing one notices about his face.
He's a skinny boy at 5'11", the type that's straight up and down with twiggy legs and a laughable lack of body tone. It's not particularly attractive to look like Jack Skellington on a bad day, but hey, at least he has a Halloween costume every year. He considers his hands his best feature.
There are two prominent moles on the right side of his face, near his mouth, and there are other small freckles on his face and body. Yes, he has played connect the dots with them. No, they didn't make anything interesting, other than Martha Stewart on the left side of his lower back. Which was mostly artistic license.
His clothing tends to not to err on the side of 'put together' - his family isn't affluent and he has an unexplained thing against buttons (now, extraneous zippers? He loves extraneous zippers. Especially in class. Zip zip.), so most of the time it's a tee shirt that belongs back in 1975 and a pair of jeans. His usual footwear consists of sandals or combat boots. When he does have to wear socks they're often mismatched; don't put it past him to pass up pairing an argyle knee-high with Pirates of the Caribbean ankle socks. Nin's only capable of being fashionable when someone else is dressing him.
Personality: Nintendo is one of those people who will never fully grasp how much less annoying the world would be without him in it. His level of thinking is rarely introspective; his energy levels are directed outward instead of inwards, and he simply doesn't have the time to ever reflect to himself, "Is this what makes me happy?", "Is this comment going to hurt someone's feelings?" "Where did my pants go?"
Oh, at some early point in his life he was around bossy people that would answer that for him, and it negated the neccessity of learning it on his own. One, however, certainly can't blame all his faults on his parentage (and he'll prefer if you didn't, thanks - he loves his mum, even if she once forgot him in a petting zoo) and some admiration is due to a lady who took care of a frightfully exasperating person for the better part of twelve years on minimum wage. His utter inability to make good decisions is inherited, not learned; he's impulsive, bad with money, bad with tempers, and pretty much a fabulous person to party with. Skip over him for your study group, though - he can't sit quietly for more then fifteen seconds at a time without opening his mouth with some obnoxious observation (ten minutes is his record, and he nearly imploded from the effort). It's not that he's quite as scholastically dumb as he acts, or necessarily trying to do it on purpose. Nintendo just has the attention span of a gnat if a subject doesn't directly interest him. There are times when he'll have flashes of curiosity and can tolerate listening to something; if he can do a task with his hands, he'll usually remember it. Otherwise, his mind wanders to all sorts of things that teenaged boys are told they shouldn't think about but do anyway, and information travels in one ear and gets into a crash somewhere near the somatic sensory cortex, where it disturbs all other thought traffic and eventually there are little thought-news helicopters hovering around in his brain to report on the carnage, and of course those are more interesting than the little smear of information that once had so much potential for letting him pass that exam next week.
Ever seen Superjail? Replace the gore with rainbows and puppies and that's pretty much how his brain works. It's pretty bizarre and in the end nothing really makes any sense and one's kind of left wondering, "Wtf was all that about?"
Alternately, sit him in front of a tv and he doesn't blink until commercials come around. That's an exaggeration, but not much of one.
Now, while he could plausibly pass his classes with a C or B average (we're being pretty generous here) if he could actually focus, it doesn't change the fact that he's pretty much an idiot socially as well. He's a bit excitable and doesn't understand sarcasm in spoken form- if you say something that sounds mean to him and it's a joke, he won't realize that it is. It's not that he doesn't 'get' the whole concept behind it, just that he's slow on the uptake. He's the type that'll immediately run to the nearest window in hopes of netting a kitten if someone informs him that it's raining cats and dogs. Tell him that his picture is beside the word 'gullible' in Webster's Dictionary and he'll be flattered, and so on and so forth.
Because he's fairly easy to manipulate, he's a consummate sidekick. He follows people around like they've got candy in their back pockets. Easily impressed? Yuuuuuuuup, that too. If he decides to fanboy you, you've pretty much got a personal cheer squad for life. Or, like, until you do something totally dickish to someone else that he fanboys and he's forced into choosing - then he really does go for the one that offers him candy. Other than that depressing fact, he'll think the world of someone he considers close, and generally tries to spend as much time with them as possible.
He isn't much of a sensitive snowflake and doesn't care for soap-opera situations, although he will hold a friend and let them have a good cry if he figures they need it and then offer to take them out for ice cream (despite not having any money BUT IT'S THE THOUGHT THAT COUNTS, although it's not going to seem like it when he tries to pay with an interpretive dance routine). Nin is fully capable of doing inadvertently mean things, sure, but that's the thing - it's inadvertent. And unless he gets smacked over the head with it, he's probably not going to realize why someone's upset with him.
Also, he develops crushes on people at the drop of a hat, and gets out of them just as fast, in yet another reason why Nin can be a jerk without fully intending to be.
Your Vices
Likes:
Girls, considerably more than boys. He's absolutely terrible with them in general though, and doesn't really know how to talk to one without accidentally insulting her. If he's got a crush on you RUN AWAY AS FAST AS YOU CAN OH GOD HE'S THE WORST BOYFRIEND EVER. Er. Well, so Tiger Woods, Jude Law, and Henry VIII take the top tier, but he's pretty high up on the list. Around Attila the Hun territory, that sort of level.
JERSEY SHORE IS HIS FAVORITE SHOW EVER GUYS. He has a JWoww poster in his room at home. I really wish I was kidding.
PB&J Sandwiches. He gets really excited whenever they actually have it on a menu somewhere.
He's been a huge motorcycle enthusiast since he was little and his mother essentially forbade him from ever getting on one, especially given that whole new pesky duplication business possibly getting him fatally smushed into a pole somewhere, but grandma Shirley who, in typical loaded grandmother fashion, had promised him her old Lincoln when she was done with it, decided it was entirely too much effort to get it driven cross-country to Vermont and transferred him some money to get a mid-range motorbike instead. He pretty much loves it more than life itself since it's the one nice thing he owns.
Unfortunately, it's Vermont, so he can't actually take it anywhere for half the year. Figures.
Also I forgot that this is just supposed to be a list. Sorry.
Dislikes: Chipmunks, chocolate, homework, fish, mint flavored things, petting zoos, Dr. Pepper, the current state of world economics. Jamie Lee Curtis.
Strengths:
Adaptive. There are some people who can't deal with change, and there are some who do admirably well with it. He's the latter, possibly because he's terrible with plans himself, and doesn't dwell too long on disappointments. Nin's an especially go-with-the-flow sort of guy and not a lot of situations get him down.
Thick-Skinned. When you go by Nintendo and wear your hair like a dirty hippie in the process, you've got to be able to tolerate odd looks, insults, and being the occasional butt of jokes. There's not a lot that's going to offend him unless someone starts going off of one of his friends.
Observant. He notices small, intrinsic things that most people would take for granted, largely because they're super obvious until someone actually mentions them.
Weaknesses:
That Whole Tricky Duplication Thing. He literally cannot control when or where it happens, so it's like an embarrassing bodily function that EVERYONE tends to notice, like that one time at that pool when he was thirteen. He'll involuntarily duplicate when he feels awkward or confused enough with a situation - probably a survival instinct, since it's not exactly easy to defend yourself when you've got scrawny little arms and FOUR scrawny little arms are better than just two (although not by much). To his merit, it does deter people since, unless you're expecting it, it's pretty startling to have three irritating punks in your face as opposed to just the first one.
There are noticeable side effects, of course, and they far outweigh the benefit of his gift thus far and probably always will. He'll tire out easily and gets easily confused when his duplicates end up wandering off to cause havoc and mayhem. They have a habit of proposing to random girls around the school, and occasionally men in their 50's for reasons that he doesn't fully understand.
Can't Really Get Enough Sleep. He's sleeping for three+. You'd be tired too.
Academically Disinclined. Stick him in a room with a teacher that focuses more on getting the information across than entertainment value and he's mentally checked out into la-la-land (which unsurprisingly looks a lot like the California Gurls music video. Katy Perry sold separately).
Impulse Control. He has none, and he's utterly incapable of saying no to anything. If he sees something he wants to do, he'll drop everything to go do it. While this could be a good trait for those people who need to care more about themselves than other people, it's not for Nin, because he doesn't really think about other people in the process. He will ditch someone to do something with someone else if it seemed more interesting, and he's not really going to feel bad about it. There are generally very few exceptions to this flaw, and he's inadvertently hurt a lot of people in the past for it.
Enabler. Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeah. Your bad decisions sound like a good time and if he's invited along for the ride, he's not going to discourage anything nomatter how stupid it is.
Fears: WWIII and zombies. Yes, he has mapped out zombie escape routes in the buildings. You can have a copy if you ask politely.
Secret: He picks his nose when no one's looking, and wipes it on the extra copies of zombie escape routes.
Family Ties
Father: David Gino Dahl (36, Thailand)
Mother: Holly Mabel Hoover (35, Whitehorse, Yukon), nee Hutchinsen
Siblings: Leah Breanne Hoover (11, Whitehorse)
Any Other Important People:
Grandmother: Shirley Louise Dahl (56, Nanimo)
Stepfather: Benjamin Washington Hoover (40, Whitehorse)
Weird Thai Stepfamily He's Never Met: Roongthip Dahl (31, Thailand) and her kids Sunan and Isra.
History
A case for the ages about why it's not proper to smoke a lot of weed while you're pregnant, Nintendo had a fairly slipshod upbringing. Born in Nanaimo, Canada, to a high-school dropout and her high-school dropout boyfriend, he spent the large part of his toddlerhood with his grandmother (who, incidentally, was also a highschool dropout, but had done very well for herself and happened to be a rather classy woman in that she owned plates that weren't made out of styrofoam). Eventually mummy-dearest had a fallout with oft-absent daddy, and she picked up and left for further North with her baby boy. For those not proficient in geography, the farther up, the colder, and thus Nin was not pleased and spent more time buried in snow drifts than he would have liked because it made for 'cute photos.'
His original moniker is Nico Dahl, that's it, and for his eighth birthday his grandmother asked him what he'd want for the occasion. He jokingly requested a middle name, although he had revised his answer shortly after to a Nintendo Gamecube. Grandma either had a sadistic sense of humor or was going preemptively senile (it was a teeny smidge of both, actually) and presented him with the name-change documentation; disappointed and obstensibly with the great sense of entitlement young people are inclined to possess, he wrote down 'Nintendo' in the box in protest. It didn't get sent off once she realized how much it actually cost, but it was absorbed into family legend and he's been called it ever since. No one ever really liked the name Nico anyway, and Nin barely remembers to respond to it.
Over the years, the family grew - his father finished his GED, earned some nice shiny degrees, and hopped a plane to Thailand to work in an English academy, where he fell madly in love with a pretty widowed lady with two kids and married her after an appropriately moderate courtship. Nin's never met her or his foreign step-siblings, but he's been told that stepmom's a total babe. It's one of those annoying things that gets brought up EVERY YEAR at Christmas dinner, "Oh, did you hear about David and his hot new wife?"
Closer to home, his mother started dating an auto mechanic at the shop she worked at, and he moved in within two months. Nin got along fine with him, and no, he's never been anything but a nice guy and entirely a more involved parent than his real father. A few years into that relationship mum got knocked up again with his half-sister Leah, and then there were four. As far as anyone can tell, Leah hasn't shown any signs of metaphysical talent - but that's also to be expected of an eleven year old, and Nin would be pretty excited if she had a reason to join him here in Vermont.
While there were many aspects of Nin's personality that labeled him as odd as a kid, his power remained dormant for the majority of his childhood, as in the cases of his peers here at Hammel. Instead, he was simply considered bubbly and hyperactive, slapped with a couple excuses of ADHD, and garnered a reputation around his school as the type of guy that was either going to grow up pretending to be a Forest Elf in the woods or OD in a parking lot somewhere. To his credit he's done neither, although YOU DON'T WANT NONE OF HIS CHARIZARD, NUH UH. His grades were always bordering on abysmal, and the only courses he could've been considered technically proficient in were gym class and shop. When you're a kid that hasn't been dealt the asthma card, that's really not that hard.
The first time that Nin experienced a brush with duplication, he had been alone in his house at the age of fourteen, around the time of your life when it's OMFG SO IMPORTANT THAT SANDY AGREES TO GO TO THE WINTER DANCE WITH ME IF SHE DOESN'T MY SOCIAL LIFE IS OVER FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE... and he'd just been rejected over the phone by Sandy Meyers, that bitch. It had been bad enough that he'd been saddled with raging migraines for the entire week beforehand, and could barely roll out of bed at 7 AM if he went to bed at 8 the night before. He doesn't remember how exactly the resulting scenario happened, but he'd taken to melodramatically lamenting how he was never going to find twoo wuv. It also didn't help much that he acutely felt like his his entire body was trying to get away from itself... physically, like his limbs were actually trying to tug off from his torso.
Chalking this up to good ol' teen anguish, Nin popped some Advil, got hungry after about ten minutes, and went downstairs to make a sandwich to find himself already eating one in the kitchen. Being an angst bucket with a bad headache at the time, Nintendo was more upset that he'd apparently used the last of the peanut butter to make a sandwich that he didn't get to eat (but apparently did?) than the metaphysical ramifications of having a real-life spitting image sitting at the counter and DRINKING THE LAST OF THE MILK TOO, THE BASTARD.
I'm kidding. He freaked out, obviously, and did what any confused boy does when they find some potentially lifestyle-changing insight into their life - locked himself in the closet. And he ate the sandwich, because REAL him was out here and Boy That Was Not Him was in there, and had apparently taken Hungry Hungry Hippos down off of the shelf and was playing in the dark. Five minutes later Nin had attempted to confront his doppelganger, or at least play a round of Hasbro with him, and only managed in making himself even more upset, which spawned another him, who also wanted a sandwich. However, as extremely undeveloped as his control over the duration in which his duplicates could tangibly exist was at the time, both were reabsorbed back into him with no warning and Nin was left feeling very violated and confused - and then mom came home and yelled at him for using up all the bread. All in all, not a very good day. Assuming this was some side effect of puberty that people just didn't talk about or the result of some hallucinogenic virus in the dairy supply, Nin kept quiet until there was undeniable proof that there really was something wrong with him.
... well, you know, other than the obvious.
The public manifestation of his power occurred shortly after in a thoroughly mundane setting - exam week. One second he had been panicking over forgetting the French word for grapefruit (pamplemousse, thank you) and the next there were three of him in his seat. Unfortunately, the other two didn't know the answer EITHER, so a fat lot of help that did him, and he got sent home immediately due to 'tomfoolery' (which did help, because then he didn't have to finish the aforementioned test, and had the time to look the answers up on google while his mother panicked about how he was probably going to get turned into a guinea pig). The school, a little confused about what to do with weird kids that suddenly developed into triplets, promptly got into contact with the authorities, who put them into contact with the institute. There also isn't usually much going on in a city of 20,000, so the headline "LOCAL STUDENT MULTIPLIES DURING STANDARD TESTING - LITERALLY!" ran the next morning (maintaining the stereotype that in cities of 20,000 there's also a distinct lack of clever newspaper editors), and before dinnertime the next day there was a Hammel representative at his door.
(Please Note: Nin likes to say that the entire thing happened in a schoolyard fight in which he was ganged up on by a group of ninjas allying with the abominable snowman because it sounds a lot more interesting, and most people have a rudimentary grasp at best in what happens in Canada anyway.)
At first, his mother was dubious about sending him to a different country in the middle of the school year, but legal responsibilities made it especially hard to refuse to let him go, and she wasn't going to, like, kill him just to keep him around (which kind of would defeat the entire purpose, and it was getting expensive to feed three-plus growing teenage boys every other day anyway); she's still a little miffed about the whole thing and insists that he come home during every major holiday.
To date, Nintendo hasn't managed to spontaneously combust, so that's a definite plus in Hammel's favor (... or not), and the ability to have someone to talk to about his utter fail is kind of nice since no one else in Whitehorse has been running around being all meta yet and would only have his normal fail to talk about instead, and that gets old after a while. While his progress has been slow, there have been notable improvements to his control over the situation - while the process is still entirely involuntary, he's learned to start controlling his emotions better, and can reabsorb his little clone army back into him at will. He's also made a few friends here, he's annoyed a lot of people too, and he doesn't quite understand why he has so many recurring memories of asking that weird girl from math class to marry him.
Roleplay Example
Adam usually went to the beach without a swimsuit in mind; he had plenty, but he tended to enjoy hanging out on the sand as opposed to getting his legs chomped off by great whites or barracudas or the wide array of sea creatures out there with big, nasty teeth just ready to rip him to shreds. If it came down to it and he REALLY wanted to put his life and limbs in danger (which he did, of course, on a daily basis by just getting up in the morning), he had no qualms about rolling his pants up and wandering in. That said, if Cade wanted to strip down to his undies and go charging into the surf, Adam wouldn't stop him. In fact, he'd probably be taking pictures.
"Oh gosh, no. Haha. I'm pretty spoiled, I'm afraid," he replied, glancing down at his drink (quite pleased that now the foam had settled and he could actually get to the coffee part at this juncture). "No washing my clothes on a washboard in a babushka for me. I already have a problem losing my socks, imagine how bad that'd be with an entire ocean? As much as I'm for, like, not tearing down coral reefs or anything, I don't want my clothes to be part of one. Then I'd be arrested by CSI or Interpol or something - the actual police part, not the band, but that'd be kinda awesome if it was the band - and labeled an ecoterrorist for accidental littering and Paul Walters will pretend that I shot him." God, Adam, it was a rhetorical question. You don't have to talk Cade's head off with tri-series television references he was probably too busy to even watch. He settled the firefighter with a level stare over the top of his cup, adding, "I'd rather not have Paul Walters pretending that I shot him."
Laundry can wait. It’s not every day that I get to go to the beach with you, Cade said, and Adam grinned at him, ostensibly excited that Adonis on Earth was inclined enough to actually BE SEEN IN PUBLIC WITH HIM, coffeeshops notwithstanding. That didn't really count since Adam had plunked himself right down anyway. "You could," he suggested. "We could get coffee on Sundays and then go to the beach. It'd be great! We can get some fresh air, you can go swimming, I can take pictures of you while you're not looking and sell it to websites... sounds fantastic, right?"
What About You?
[/blockquote]
Name: Stevie
Age: 23
Experience: 11 years
How Did You Find Us? CHEZUU THE MAGNIFICENT.
Ready To Play? OH GOD I DON'T KNOW I FEEL LIKE I SHOULD WRITE MORE D;
