[hider=The Music Teacher] [INDENT][COLOR=SLATEGRAY][CENTER][sup][h1][center][img]Banner[/img][/center][b][center][color=black] M A R T H O L D F O X[/color] [color=dee5f7]M A R T H O L D F O X[/color][/center] [/b][/h1][/sup] [color=silver][sup][i]"There now. That's a little closer to music."[/i][/sup][/color][/CENTER][table][row][/row][row][cell][center][sub][sup][sub][h3][b][color=734e66]◈[/color][color=black] C H A R A C T E R P O R T R A I T[/color][color=734e66]◈[/color] [color=dee5f7]C H A R A C T E R P O R T R A I T[/color] [/b][/h3][/sub][/sup][/sub][sup]_________________________________________________________[/sup][img]https://i.imgur.com/N6O2e68.png[/img] [sub][COLOR=darkgray](FC: Kedar Williams-Stirling; Dialogue: [color=dee5f7][b]Pale Blue[/b][/color])[/COLOR][/sub] [sup]_________________________________________________________[/sup][sub][sup][sub][h3][b][color=734e66]◈[/color][color=black] S U M M A R Y[/color][color=734e66]◈[/color] [color=dee5f7]S U M M A R Y[/color][/b][/h3][/sub][/sup][/sub][sup]_________________________________________________________[/sup] [sub][COLOR=darkgray]Marth Benjamin Oldfox[/COLOR] [sup]_________________________________________________________[/sup] [COLOR=darkgray]December 3rd[/COLOR] [b]|[/b] [COLOR=darkgray]25[/COLOR] [sup]_________________________________________________________[/sup] [COLOR=darkgray]Single[/COLOR] [b]|[/b] [COLOR=darkgray]Male[/COLOR] [b]|[/b] [COLOR=darkgray]Homosexual[/COLOR][/sub] [indent][sub][sup][sub][h3][b][color=734e66]◈[/color][color=black] S T A T S[/color][color=734e66]◈[/color] [color=dee5f7]S T A T S[/color][/b][/h3][/sub][/sup][/sub][/INDENT][sup]_________________________________________________________[/sup] [sub][COLOR=darkgray]Height[/COLOR] [b]|[/b] [COLOR=darkgray]5'9"[/COLOR] [sup]_________________________________________________________[/sup] [COLOR=darkgray]Hair Color[/COLOR] [b]|[/b] [COLOR=darkgray]Black[/COLOR] [sup]_________________________________________________________[/sup] [COLOR=darkgray]Eye Color[/COLOR] [b]|[/b] [COLOR=darkgray]Dark Brown[/COLOR] [sup]_________________________________________________________[/sup] [COLOR=darkgray]Hometown[/COLOR] [b]|[/b] [COLOR=darkgray]Calder City[/COLOR][/sub][/center] [INDENT] [color=#2e2c2c]-[/color][/indent][/cell][cell][INDENT][sub][sup][sub][h3][b][color=black] H I S T O R Y[/color] [color=dee5f7]H I S T O R Y[/color][/b][/h3][/sub][/sup][/sub][/INDENT][sup]___________________________________________________________________________________[/sup] [COLOR=DARKGRAY][indent][color=734e66]◈[/color] His childhood was not unhappy in any simple, merciful way, because it was not unhappy at all in the usual sense. It was loud, loving, strange, crowded, lavender-scented, and full of the ordinary little storms that pass through big families and leave everyone at the breakfast table anyway. Marth was one of six siblings, raised in a house where someone was always singing in the next room, arguing over toast, painting by a window, dancing barefoot through a hallway, or calling for a missing shoe that had somehow found its way into a cupboard. Marth's parents were loving, eccentric, and almost impossible to embarrass. His father was a painter, the sort of man who forgot time when color was involved, and his mother was a dancer who treated music as if it were passing through the body. His maternal grandparents lived close enough to feel like part of the walls. Together, the whole family helped run The Old Lavender House, a grand lavender-painted Victorian home passed down through generations and kept alive as a bed and breakfast. There were guest rooms with old quilts, staircases that complained at night, vases of drying flowers, and mornings full of eggs, coffee, sheet music, paint water, and relatives speaking over one another with great affection. But Marth's gift first announced itself through pain. Not his own, though it felt like his own when it came. His paternal grandfather was dying from a long, brutal illness, and Marth, still young enough to believe adults could keep the worst things behind closed doors, heard him mentally crying out in agony. The voice arrived inside him with no warning, intimate and unbearable, a private suffering that should have belonged to one man and suddenly belonged to a child too. That was the first time Marth understood he could hear what others never meant to give him. It was also his first real grief. After his grandfather died, music became the place Marth put what he could not bear to hear anymore. He discovered his singing voice almost by accident, then learned one instrument, then another, as if every new sound gave the pain a different room to rest in. His family, artsy and gentle and a little hippie in their old-fashioned way, did not teach him to fear his gift. They taught him restraint. They taught him privacy. They taught him that tenderness was not the same thing as permission, and that even love should knock before entering. Now Marth works as a middle school music teacher, which suits him so profoundly it seems less like a profession than a natural extension of his soul. He uses his telepathy carefully, rarely reaching deeper than surface thoughts unless he must, and even then with the unease of someone touching a door that may not belong to him. His life has been, for the most of it, lovely, ordinary if not magical, and kind, which is perhaps why recent discomfort sits so strangely on him. Since ending his first and only relationship after discovering his boyfriend had cheated, Marth has found himself visited by the kind of trouble he has never quite known what to do with: a scorned ex-lover appearing unannounced and drunk at his apartment in the middle of the night, wounded, insistent, and careless with the peace Marth has always tried to keep. It has left a lingering unease in him, a feeling of being watched for, wanted wrongly, interrupted in his own life. Marth is not used to fear arriving with a familiar face. Still, he tries to be sensible. He tries to be kind. He tries not to confuse pity with invitation, or softness with surrender. Most days, he succeeds. Most days, he makes gentleness look like its own kind of music.[color=734e66]◈[/color][/indent][/COLOR] [INDENT][sub][sup][sub][h3][b][color=black] A B I L I T I E S[/color] [color=dee5f7]A B I L I T I E S[/color][/b][/h3][/sub][/sup][/sub][/INDENT][sup]__________________________________________________________________________________[/sup] [COLOR=DARKGRAY][INDENT][color=734e66]◈[/color] [b][color=dee5f7]Telepathy[/color][/b]: Marth is a telepath with telempathic undertones, allowing him to read and hear the surface thoughts of others with buried emotional impressions such as the fear, shame, grief, affection, anger, or calm that arrive to him as tone beneath the language, like hearing the chord under a melody. With focus, he can press deeper to reach into memories, though doing so requires more effort and carries a heavier moral weight. He can also communicate telepathically, placing his voice inside another's thoughts with a softness that can feel like comfort, warning, or trespass, depending on how gently he enters. Through this connection, others can respond to him with their thoughts in return. The telempathic undertone of his power grants him light influence of emotional states through telepathic contact. Marth cannot rewrite someone's heart or fully control their emotions like a true Empath, but rather he can project a kind of emotional tuning and resonance in small measures. When threatened, he can turn that inner voice harsher, bombarding someone with his own thoughts in a sudden psychic rush meant to disorient, overwhelm, and confuse, causing mental discomfort rather than physical harm. The telempathic aspect of this allows his thoughts to interrupt how someone's brain interprets sensations like sight, breath, pain, balance, fear, and numbness. So while the body remains physically intact and unharmed, Marth can use his telepathy to press a telempathic suggestion into someone's mind. He cannot make the body perform impossible damage, only convince the mind of a sensation. The effect only lasts while Marth focuses on projecting it, so it is temporary and completely psychosomatic. The target experiences the sensation as real enough to react because the body obeys the mind's panic. A person who thinks they have gone blind may stumble and freeze. Or a person who believes they are being suffocated may begin gasping and clutching their throat. He usually needs eye contact or a strong telepathic lock to do it well and it lasts only seconds unless he keeps concentrating and even then, he may experience psychic recoil if he pushes too hard or too long because Marth's naturally empathic nature makes him susceptible to feeling some echo of what he inflicts. [color=734e66]◈[/color] [b][color=dee5f7][url=https://i.imgur.com/VAVjAIk.gif]Mindlight[/url][/color][/b]: The harsher aspect of his gift is a visible psychic manifestation that blooms at the center of his forehead as a swirling, rippling orb of pale pink mindlight, luminous as a small tide caught beneath skin and starshine. It appears only when he summons it, and once it forms, he must choose: hold, fire, or dismiss. Nothing happens passively. The orb must be released and must reach its target for the effect to take hold. A quick fire is rougher and stronger, capable of stunning someone or knocking them unconscious, but it often comes with an uncomfortable psychic recoil against him. A steadier hold allows for cleaner effects, such as sleep or direct emotional influence, while the longest hold can brush memory itself, requiring the most control and the greatest restraint. Because the orb is visible, it gives him away. Everyone can see the moment his power gathers. And because he can dismiss it, every use becomes a small moral trial: the charged, breathless pause between mercy and violation. [/INDENT][/COLOR] [INDENT][sub][sup][sub][h3][b][color=black] P E R S O N A L I T Y[/color] [color=dee5f7]P E R S O N A L I T Y[/color][/b][/h3][/sub][/sup][/sub][/INDENT][sup]__________________________________________________________________________________[/sup] [COLOR=DARKGRAY][INDENT] [color=734e66]◈[/color] Marth is still in the way a room is still after music has ended: not empty, only softly holding the last note. At twenty-five, he has the calm, picturesque manner of someone raised in a loving, somewhat eccentric home, among old songs, strange little family traditions, and five other siblings who taught him tenderness through teasing, fussing, and the occasional merciless correction. He is warm, easy-going, and storybook-classical in the bones, with an elegance that never seems rehearsed. He is not stern, exactly, but he does have standards, and his quiet judgment usually arrives as a tilted head, a gentle “Mm,” or a look that makes nonsense feel suddenly very aware of itself. There is an open warmth in him that often reaches his eyes before it reaches his voice. He laughs easily, sometimes at himself first, with the kind of soft, surprised brightness that makes a room feel less guarded. His care has a sheltering quality to it, old-fashioned and faintly enchanted: a lamp left on, a scarf placed over someone’s shoulders, a hand resting briefly on a student’s music folder before a recital, a half-hummed melody while he straightens chairs after class. As a middle school music teacher, he is patient with noise because he understands that noise is often only feeling before it learns where to go. He notices when a child has gone quiet, when laughter is covering shame, when a wrong note has become the whole world for someone small and trying very hard. He does not make comfort into a performance. He simply comes nearer and makes the room easier to be in. Beneath that gentle composure is a sentimental heart he cannot always keep neatly folded away. Marth feels deeply, though never with much melodrama. A remembered song can make him wistful. An old photograph can still him. A sweet, ordinary kindness can catch him off guard and leave him blinking it away with a little laugh, as if embarrassed by his own softness. There is something mystical about him, too, but not grandly so. More like a man who suspects every house has a favorite hour, every child has a hidden rhythm, and every silence is waiting for the right note to open it. Still, he tries to be sensible. He can be pragmatic when needed, even if his pragmatism often arrives with a teacup, a sigh, and a little too much feeling tucked underneath. He does not need to rescue people from themselves. But sometimes he tries. Not because he wants control, and not because he thinks himself wiser than everyone else, though he can be a little guilty of both in small, harmless ways. He does it because he is soft-hearted, because he believes people are often braver when someone quietly believes for them first. Marth is not tragic. He is not broken. He is simply tender in a world that can be careless with tender things. Most days, he makes gentleness look like its own kind of music. [color=734e66]◈[/color] [/INDENT][/COLOR] [INDENT][sub][sup][sub][h3][b][color=black] M O T I V A T I O N S & G O A L S[/color] [color=dee5f7]M O T I V A T I O N S & G O A L S[/color][/b][/h3][/sub][/sup][/sub][/INDENT][sup]__________________________________________________________________________________[/sup] [COLOR=DARKGRAY][INDENT][color=734e66]◈[/color] Marth has no major goals right now, too busy focusing on his job as a middle school music teacher and helping run the family bed and breakfast to think beyond the present moment. Perhaps future events will drive him toward greater ambitions.[color=734e66]◈[/color][/INDENT][/COLOR][/cell][/row][/table][/COLOR][/INDENT] [/hider]