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Elias James Hawthorne
"I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy. Not my own words, heard Tom Waits say it once, but I gotta say it rings pretty true."
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Back to Basics
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Elias James Hawthorne
Aliases: Eli, EJ,
Age: 24
Gender: Male
Tourist or Local?: Local
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Appearance
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6’
Build: Lean and muscular
Hair: Black and scruffy
Eyes: Dark brown
Distinguishing Marks: He has a tattoo of a crow on his left shoulder.
Style: Casual, Eli wears jeans and sneakers, has a variety of leather jackets, a few hoodies, various shirts and a few hats all of which were purchased at thrift stores.
General Appearance: Eli’s eyes always look a bit sad, even when he’s smiling, he usually has some degree of scruff and his hair is usually disheveled when it’s not hidden under a hat. He rarely has a tan, his skin naturally stays pale, but he does get a sunburn if he’s ever out in the sun long enough.
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Skills & Occupation
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Eli owns and runs an occult shop that has been in his family for years called Spectral located in the Eastfort Center. Spectral was originally owned by his Grandmother, and while it’s a bit more run down than the majority of the other shops it gets a huge amount of tourist foot traffic. A sign shaped like a black cat with its back arched sits above the door and reads Spectral: Home of the Strange and the Familiar, and Eli enjoys introducing himself as the strange before gesturing to the black cat who lives in the shop, Morpheus, as the familiar. His shop sells all sorts of things related to the occult, witchcraft, and supernatural. He also offers a wide variety of tea’s and services such as tarot and palm readings as well as cleansings of homes of poltergeists.
Hobbies & Interests: Drinking, gambling and trying to cheat at games of chance, reading, bad jokes and puns, and close up magic (the fake kind).
Skills: Eli can handle himself in a fight and is pretty quick if he needs to run. To some, his close connection to the spirit realm could be considered a skill although he would call it more of an inconvenience, and he has some theoretical knowledge of witchcraft from his grandmother and from books in his shop but has never cared to give it a try. Personally, he’d also consider his high alcohol tolerance a skill.
Supernatural Sensitivity: High sensitivity as a psychic; having seen ghosts since he was a child, he can pick up on auras around him, channeling, and he has occasionally experienced premonitions. Eli has spent most of his adult life struggling to suppress these abilities so they aren’t as developed or fine-tuned as someone who had fully embraced them and they usually have strong physical and mental side effects for him.
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Psychology
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At his very core Eli is a people person, he likes to make people happy and feels most at home running his shop. He doesn’t mind all the tourists, even the ones who like it’s all fake, he plays a long with it, happy to fall into the role of an eccentric shop owner. He reads fortunes and tarot, does close up magic, and tells old ghost stories to the customers, of course he does it all the fake way choosing to ignore his supernatural gifts. He tries very hard to believe it’s all fake, Eli fears going back to believing in the supernatural will cost him his sanity and that’s the one thing he’s afraid to lose.
Eli is an absolute optimist, he always believes things will get better and is driven by a hope for a brighter future. Having already hit what he believes to be his rock bottom, his time in a mental institution, he knows things could be worse and that even the worse things don’t last forever. He likes to make people happy, he will go out of his way to do this, and even though the town is full of people that look at him like he’s either a joke or a loser, he’s never held it against them. He’s willing to stand up for himself and for others if needed but prefers to avoid violence unless absolutely necessary. He has a very strong will, some might even say stubborn, but when he wants something he doesn’t give up and his will has even been strong enough to convince himself that everything paranormal he’s ever experienced was never real.
Eli’s life has been plagued by loneliness; as child his main friends were his grandmother and various spirits, and as an adult his closest friend is a cantankerous cat. Although he’s friendly and likes people he gives off a weird vibe, spends most of his time either in a creepy old shop or drinking alone at the shady bar near the caravan park. While he doesn’t actively hold grudges, he does go out of his way to avoid the few people he doesn’t like; such as old school bullies or an ex-girlfriend here and there. He enjoys a good pun or joke, has been known to talk a little too much especially when nervous and tries a little too hard when he meets new people because he’s just a little bit desperate for human connection.
Bio: The Hawthorne family has lived in Rawyn for years and they have always been deeply connected to the paranormal and occult as well as looked down upon by the town as drunks, charlatans, and general weirdos. Eli’s family tree is littered with witches and psychics, in addition to those who have use their family name to run scams. Among both locals and tourists in the know, his grandmother gained quite a bit of notoriety as powerful psychic and proud witch although just as many would claim her to be another fake looking to scam people out of there hard earned money. His grandma, commonly known as Madam Hawthorne, opened the towns occult shop where she read tarot and tea leaves, held séances, and cleansed homes of ghosts and bad energy. She was also frequently arrested for practicing witchcraft skyclad on the beach. Eli’s mother, on the other hand, was a more practical person; a hardworking single mother and nurse who constantly tried, in vain, to keep her son away from anything paranormal.
His childhood home was a halfway decent trailer in Shifting Sands caravan park, just like many a Hawthorne before him. Although he grew up poor he was always clothed and fed with a roof above his head so, until other children teased him about it, he never really knew he wasn’t as well off as others. Eli was always a bit off as a child, something about him always seemed to mark him as “different” to the other children; he was weird, his family was weird, his clothes were from thrift shops and were weird, so no matter how hard he tried, he never gained acceptance from his peers. In place of friends he spent most of this younger years reading or exploring the surroundings of Shifting Sands and from a young age he could be heard talking to “people” who others couldn’t see. His mother worked long hours to support him and his eccentric grandmother did most of the babysitting. Eli adored his grandmother and spending hours in her shop and listening to her ghost stories were usually the highlight of his day. She saw the potential in her grandson, his connection to spirits, and, even against his mother’s wishes, his grandmother taught him as much as she could to control and harness his gift.
Eli was spending the night at his grandmothers while his mother worked a late shift when he awoke, screaming, in the middle of the night. He was terrified for his mother, convinced that something terrible was going to happen. His grandmother called up his mother and while they were talking on the phone she got into a terrible car accident. Eli was nine when he lost his mother and ended up in the care of his grandmother. He blamed himself, and his so-called gift, for causing the accident, convinced that if she hadn’t been on the phone she might have noticed the car that ran a red light, she might not have died that night.
Eli’s was teased and bullied exactly as much as you would expect for a scrawny kid whose only friends were his grandmother and the occasional spirit. By the end of middle school, he was sick of being beaten up, so over the summer he focused on working out and learning to defend himself. His hard work and recent growth spurt lead to him going from the prime target to someone most kids left alone. It also helped that he knocked out the school’s main bully one day in the parking lot during the first week of high school. He was suspended but all in all it was worth it as most of the kids left him alone after that.
As a teenager, Eli desperately wanted to fit and he tried, he really did. He put himself out there, went to parties, joined clubs and sports teams, but he could never shake the weird kid label. He was sixteen when he was drinking with some kids at the beach, goofing around and playing truth or dare. His dare was to touch the lighthouse. His grandmother and mother both had warned him since he was old enough to walk to stay away from the lighthouse, and something deep within him knew to stay away from the lighthouse. More than anything, more than self-preservation even, Eli wanted friends and he wanted to fit in. The closer he got to the lighthouse the colder he felt, the kind of cold that seeps in past skin and muscle and leaks into your bones. He felt pure terror like he’d never felt before, primal fear that screamed at him to run even as he placed a trembling hand on the lighthouse. Eli woke up cold and screaming much further down the beach from the lighthouse the next morning. The rest of the night was a blank even to the others involved and they all just assumed they blacked out. He never told his grandmother about the lighthouse, in fact the mere mention of the lighthouse causes that same terror to begin to build within him and sends cold shivers throughout his body. His efforts failed to earn him any friends and eventually he gave up and resigned himself to being the town weirdo.
Eli’s grandmother died shortly after he graduated from high school, she was alone in her trailer where she suffered a heart attack on night. There were some people in the town that claimed she was literally scared to death, possibly by a vengeful spirit, although being in a small-town people also loved to make up stories that were more interesting than the truth. Eli took her death hard, he couldn’t except it, unable to be convinced that his grandmother who had been a beacon of strength in his life had met such a mundane end. He convinced himself a spirit was responsible and he became obsessed with trying to solve his grandmother’s death. He became that crazy guy trying to catch a phantom killer, taking pills to stay awake all day and night investigating any and every ghost story in town before eventually he ended up having a complete mental breakdown and ended up spending a year in a mental institution.
Being unable to tell the difference between reality and fiction was the most terrifying thing he had ever experienced, even more so than the lighthouse. Had he ever seen a ghost or had he just been seeing things and hearing voices for his whole life? It became so much easier to just believe it was all fake, that the world was the way the majority of people saw it, no ghost or spirits, no need to worry about energies and magic, just mundanity and people tricked by smoke and mirrors. After his release, he was resigned to ignore his paranormal predilections, he didn’t want to ever go back, he didn’t want to be crazy and he was convinced giving in to that would make him lose his mind again. His grandmother had left her shop to him and he was finally ready to reopen it. He liked feeling connected to his grandmother and felt as long as he stayed convinced that all the occult and paranormal stuff was a gag, that he would be alright. He embraced his role as a tourist attraction. The more Eli repressed his psychic abilities the more he started developing headaches and migraines. The worse the headaches got the more he drank until he became exactly the guy he never wanted to be; another drunk loser in the trailer park. His time with the patrons of his store, and with Morpheus the store’s cat, are his main source of social interaction. Although his store gets a lot of foot traffic and always seems somewhat busy on the outside, in reality it’s mostly people stopping in for a look and Eli is just barely scrapping by.
Weaknesses and/or fears: Insanity, losing his mind, and going back to a mental institution. Eli feels he has a fragile grip on reality and not being able to tell what’s real and what’s not is one of the most terrifying things he can imagine. Eli’s also terrified of the lighthouse, he doesn’t like to talk about it or hear other people talking about it. His attempts to suppress his connection to the supernatural have left him with terrible headaches and a dependency on alcohol and marijuana.
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