Cecile René Delacroix

Cecil is technically a nickname, he finds his real name to be too girly sounding.

December 11, 1971

Male

Cecil has messy brown hair he avoids combing whenever possible, citing his tenderheaded-ness.The tooth next to his right front tooth is missing, leaving a small gap just big enough to hold the filters of pilfered cigarettes in place while he talks, so long as he keeps his mouth mostly shut. He is red in the nose and cheeks and freckled almost everywhere, with thick, pointy brown eyebrows and a strong chin. He stands a head above his peers, and has a solid thickness to his frame that suggests he will grow up to be muscular. He is usually dirty or sticky, or some combination thereof, and smells like vinegar. He has a southern accent -- specifically that of Louisiana's Cajuns -- and frequently peppers his speech with bad french. His voice is distinctively hoarse all the time, likely a result of his dual interests in smoking and being loud. He typically wears simple jeans, t-shirts, and button ups handed down by his taller brother, with his only recognizable piece of clothing being his dark brown boots, which serve as his only pair of footwear, and his dark green "soldier coat", a prized hand-me-down from his brother, which had several additional pockets sewn in by his mother to make it a suitable Christmas present.

For all the roughhousing and abrasiveness that make Cecil an "acquired taste", what has kept him in the group of friends has been that Cecil is still ultimately good. He enjoys charlie-horsing his friends at opportune times, using curses and slurs whenever possible, and spitting to emphasize his speech. In spite of this, he has a disdain for bullying in all of its forms, and tries to model his behavior after old-fashioned heroes played by John Wayne, Chuck Norris, and the Hoff. Being an asshole and class clown in equal spades, his presence can usually either attract or deter attention depending on his mood, though his bad reputation and eagerness to fight keeps the group safe from actual bullies.

Aside from his warped sense of justice and strange choice in role-models, escapism into fantasy is an additionally major part of Cecil's psyche. Growing up with the cards he had been dealt, Cecil has frequently found comfort in cassette recordings of books, music, and radio shows. He has a great interest in urban legends, extra-terrestrials, and "The Samsquanch", and is an avid fan of schlock horror programs and "paranormal research". He is fairly superstitious, taking great heed of things he believes to be signs and omens of good or bad luck, and many southern superstitions such as voodoo and water-witching. He is Christian, but only in the usual sense of a fourteen year old's spirituality -- He prays when he wants things, when he is scared, and when he wants teachers to forget to give tests. Most notably, in times of great stress, Cecil prays for strength.

Cecil has a great eagerness to grow up, most obviously evidenced by his smoking and wearing a coat that is clearly too large for him. Looking deeper, Cecil's expectations of adulthood are the true underlying reason for his chafing at being a boy -- Adults can come and go as they please, smoke in front of cops, and not have to fold their hands at desks. Adults also don't get the shit smacked out of them by their dads, but that is another facet of Cecil entirely.

Beauregard "Bo" Delacroix, 39 – Bo is, in a word, intimidating. There is nothing outwardly jarring about him other than his size, the man being a wall of fat and muscle, though increasingly questionable details reveal themselves the more you give the man a look. He has small, scattered tattoos all across his body, most notably on his hands, face, and neck. The quality, varying degrees of fading and subjects -- insects, daggers, dice, and crosses mostly -- make it clear that he received them either in a prison or in someone's kitchen. He has feint bald streaks hidden in his short-cropped hair, too curved and wild to have been from surgery, and hands that have been callused into clubs. His thick accent makes him emotionally unavailable to everyone through a self-imposed language barrier of sorts, and even then, the only emotion there can be seen on the man is feint, bubbling anger. He is essentially a caricature of a dive bar bouncer, which he is.

Cecilia Delacroix, 35 - If her husband's appearance can be summarized as "intimidating", then Cecilia is just as easily described as "tired". Her dirty blonde hair either grows darker at the roots or is in a constant need of being re-dyed, and she favors heavy, dark makeup to hide the features she has lost to smoking, sometimes being complimented by her coworkers as "Looking like Nancy Spungen." She typically wears cherry-red lipstick or nail polish, and is somehow either chewing gum or smoking at any given moment.

Marcel Delacroix. 19 - Marcel is Cecil's cool older brother. Like his father, he is decorated with tattoos, even on his hands and face, though they are better in quality and clearly done by a professional (His father refers to them as "pretty"). He is the source of most of Cecil's criminal knowledge and bad habits, such as smoking, swearing, cutting class, and listening to hair metal. He is probably in a gang.

• Cecil is the closest thing a fourteen year old can get to being "good at fighting", and is a crack shot with a slingshot. He claims to know martial arts and have an acute knowledge of pressure points, though the story for how he came to learn these things is increasingly dubious with each retelling.

• Cecil has experience hunting with his father and older brother, and catching small animals such as squirrels, possums, and rabbits with slipknots and cages. If Cecil could agree to a uniform, he'd probably make a really good boy scout.

• Despite his limited literacy, Cecil is good at memorizing short phrases, lists, and numbers. He does so by humming them to Dixieland. He is also pretty good at jokes and riddles, having memorized enough of either to understand the correct cadence, patterns, and path of thinking for both.

• Though it isn't necessarily a skill, one of Cecil's unknown strengths is that he is almost questionably lucky. He frequently narrowly avoids being hit by cars he wanders past like Mr. Magoo, oftentimes receives two sodas from vending machines, and was illegally "blessed" by snake-handling preachers as an infant in Louisiana without being bitten. Cecil has jumped into his above-ground pool from heights that logically should have killed him, and has done so every summer. However, Cecil doesn't win every coin toss and draw a royal flush at every game of cards -- his luck is purely of the dumb variety, and more often than not correlates to danger Cecil was unaware of or things he had not hoped for or expected.

• Cecil has an uncanny ability to say the right things to piss people off and either push them away or get them to chase him. Whether speaking to a Lovecraftian horror, scary federal agent in a suit, or even a teacher, Cecil is one of those kids who can take one good look at a person and immediately figure out something they're self-conscious of and hammer at it. He's the king of those kinds of kids, actually.