Séb Charbonneau
{"
Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?"
}-
John Keats|
Full Name |
Sébastien André Charbonneau
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Nickname |
Séb. English and American tongues tend to pronounce it "Sehb," without the accent. It's a simple shortening of his name, and Sébastien prefers it over his full forename for both its brevity and informality - he feels that "Sébastien" makes him sound haughty and stuck up.
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Birth Date |
October 15th, 1989
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Age |
Sébastien has the appearance of a 24 year old male, although being only 26 years old in truth it makes little matter.
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Gender |
Male.
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Sexuality |
Sébastien identifies as what might be called 'heteroflexible'. He is heteroromantic with bisexual tendencies, preferring women as relationship partners, but not averse to the odd one-night fling with one, or two, other males.
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Relationship Status |
Romantically unattached, and he prefers it that way.
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Occupation |
Sébastien has been something of a drifter, and what little work he does tends to take place behind a bar - they're easy jobs to come by. He hasn't stayed in one place long for kind of a while, though, and most of the time he leaves the till a little lighter than he found it. He is currently working at a semi-busy bar in the town.
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Role |
Coven member
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Coven or Pack? |
Coven
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In Depth Appearance |
Séb's hair and eyes are both strikingly dark against his pale skin. Most of the time, the whites of his eyes are shot with dull red. At its longest, his naturally straight hair brushes his jawline, although he tends to keep it reasonably well trimmed and pushed back away from his face. Séb has a generally attractive and symmetrical face, excepting a small scar, on his lower lip, just right of centre. It's hard to see against his pale skin, unless his lips are pursed or he's laughing. He doesn't remember how he got it.
Standing at just about 6' with a medium, bordering on athletic frame, Séb is a forgettably average size and he blends into the background fairly easily. Prefering to avoid attention, he tends to wear plain, though dark, clothing; he's most often found in dark straight jeans with a dark neutral or black T-shirt, underneath a black Harrington or leather bomber jacket. He doesn't wear designer labels. Occasionally this uniform might be accented with a flannel shirt if the weather's cold enough, but more often than not Séb enjoys the cold.
Although Séb's not really a fan of wearing jewellery - he just can't be bothered - he does have two cartilage piercings in his left ear: one silver stud in his tragus and a silver ring on the outer rim of his ear. They tend to act as distinguishing features, often pointed out by strangers in the absence of much else remarkable about Séb's appearance. Séb acquired both of these piercings during the end of a rebellious phase at the age of nineteen and keeps them out of nostalgia.
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Habits | Oddities | Quirks |
Immortality gave Séb an excuse to take up smoking. He enjoys the cold air, the taste, the kind of people you strike up conversation with smoking outside of bars and clubs. Although others might see it as a dirty habit, Séb sees it as less of an addiction and more something he just really likes doing. He rolls his own cigarettes, and does so compulsively when uneasy. When he doesn't have tobacco to hand, his second nervous habit is lip biting; faced with a decision he doesn't want to make, or a tense situation, he chews his lip while his mind turns a hundred miles an hour. Often, when his his mouth isn't occupied by smoking or feeding, he'll chew gum. In fact, it would be fair to say that Sébastien Charbonneau has some sort of oral fixation. Séb is also a bit of a control freak and doesn't like being in cars driven by other people, when he could be in his own car, driving himself. He would rather offer someone a ride than take one. Being something of a loner, most people don't know this about Séb, but he can't fall asleep without the window open.
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Hobbies |
Séb loves to drive. He loves dark, solitary journeys, with the sparse headlights of other cars lighting up the interior of his own in ghostly monochrome, late night radio buzzing and cigarette smoke whipping from the open driver's side window. Often driving with no particular destination in mind, it's become a comforting, clarifying passtime for him. He also hikes and forages, having slowly built an understanding of both the practical and poisonous flora of Pennsylvania. His keen eyesight allows him to keep up this hobby even though he can't do it in the daylight hours. He often takes advantage of the opportunity during these trips to hunt, usually for animals.. Recent hostilities between werewolf and vampire groups have curbed his enthusiasm for hiking around the town and surrounding areas, however.
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Likes |
- Being alone. It's not that Séb's 'antisocial' - he just sees himself as being on his own journey through life. He tends to be independant in most of his activities.
- Card games. He tends to carry a pack of cards, either in his car or on his person. When he does choose to be social, there's little he prefers more than a game of poker or cheat with good company.
- Smoking.
- Attractive company, be it male, female, or outside of the binary.
- Nature, particularly under a bright, full moon when plants and prey are more easily seen.
- The open highway.
- Night time and the cold.
- Being a vampire. Even though Séb didn't choose this life, and he struggled to come to terms with what he was at first, he embraces vampirism.
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Dislikes |
- Heat and stuffy rooms are suffocating to Séb. Likewise, he doesn't like to be in brightly lit areas, especially when they're filled with people. It makes him feel exposed and vulnerable. This isn't just a 'creature of the night' quirk, but is definitely exacerbated by the vampirism.
- Whatever the opposite of a sweet tooth is, that's what Séb has. He hates soda, ice cream, chocolate, anything sickly-sweet.
- Uninteresting people, suburbanites, yuppies.
- Shopping centres. See above, RE: brightly lit areas filled with people.
- Wearing socks in bed.
- Being in the passenger seat.
- Religion.
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Fears |
Séb's greatest fear is losing his freedom. Just the thought of being under anyone else's control fills him with fear and anger. The ability to make his own choices, even if they're the wrong ones, is more important to him than anything in his life and he is secretly terrified of that ability being stolen from him. One aspect of this is a fear of being recognised by anyone from his past - the reason he has been drifting for the last couple of years, and the reason he prefers to stay unremarkable. He fears attachment and commitment because he believes that it will infringe on his freedom and his ability to disappear at a moment's notice should things go wrong. Séb also fears the open ocean and what waits beneath the surface - as a child he was fascinated by stories of monsters lurking in the deepest reaches, but has internalised one too many as an adult.
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Personality Traits |
- Playful
- Independant, solitary
- Pensive to the point of broodiness
- Quick to anger when he feels out of control. Could sometimes be described as a control freak.
- Fidgety
- Charming and humorous
- Curious, adventurous
- Flighty
- Séb often toes the line between good and bad. Every now and again he likes to indulge his darker side, and he has few moral reservations about killing humans, although he does so extremely sparingly because he knows that making it a habit will get him into trouble, and get him there quickly.
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Personality |
On the surface, Séb is easy to get along with. He doesn't get into arguments with strangers, and is more than happy striking up conversation with new faces. He can even be quite charming at times, especially when he wants something, and even more so now that he is learning to control his powers of manipulation. He is quick to smile and laugh and has a good sense of humour. For these reasons, he makes for a pretty good bartender. He's also reasonably intelligent - not MENSA level, by any means, but not dull either. Had he chosen to, he could have done reasonably well in university. On a deeper level, he doesn't maintain many friendships. Since becoming a vampire he hasn't really had the opportunity, being wary of prolonged human contact and knowing that attachment to humans is a bad idea when you're a vampire, and a young one at that. It is only since he arrived in Bellingstone and came into contact with other vampires that he has been able to relax his guard a little and make some more meaningful connections. At any rate, he prefers to spend his free time alone, on the open road or in the hills, hiking, foraging and hunting.
Séb tends to find that the noise inside his head gets too loud to bare unless he can get away from people now and again and he finds the quiet, cold darkness of night extremely calming and clarifying. He has a tendancy to disappear for a night or two when regular life gets a bit overbearing for him, and especially when he feels out of control. Séb likes to call the shots in his own life. It is extremely important to Séb that he is the master of his own destiny, and this works its way into the smaller things - like the way he prefers to be in the driver's seat, to live in his own place, to stay romantically unattached. When his darker side comes out to play, it's reflected in his delight at manipulating his prey - he likes to play with his food before he eats it, letting his victim know that he is in complete control. And Séb definitely has a darker side. A young vampire, he doesn't see why he shouldn't enjoy this lifestyle, as long as he doesn't lapse for long enough to rouse the suspicion of the locals. He will usually travel out of town when the urge to indulge his more sadistic tendencies rears its head. Blood slaves are OK, but blood justs tastes that much mre savoury to him when it's saturated with fear. Although taking human victims doesn't hurt his conscience
too much, he doesn't exactly see himself as an inherently bad or evil creature; just as any animal following its baser instincts.
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Place of Origin |
Nanterre, Paris
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History |
Sébastien Sauveterre was born in Paris in October 1989. He was the oldest of three children, with a younger brother and even younger sister. His parents were happily married and owned their four-bedroom home in Nanterre, and Séb and his siblings wanted for little except the latest extravagent toy or games console, for which they'd have to wait until Christmas or some other special occasion. Séb's comfortable, secular upbringing yielded a beautifully average teenager - his only real acts of rebellion were the two piercings in his left ear and one ill-fated attempt to dye his hair block red, which resulted in a buzz cut for the teen. Never outstandingly popular, Séb wasn't particularly bookish either, and had a decent handful of friends and reasonable grades at the end of high school. Sébs life was by all accounts totally average, until, the May after his 24th birthday, he met Céleste.
Céleste was not average. Her hair fell around her shoulders in silvery blonde ringlets, her eyes were turquoise framed by feathery dark eyelashes, and her skin was caramel that glowed where the light touched it. Looking back, Séb had known that his average life had ended the moment she had asked him what he was drinking, early that Friday evening while he waited for his friends at their regular bar. The rest of that summer seemed to disappear in a bright blur of heady drunken nights, music, and Céleste. As he slipped deeper under her spell, Séb began to lose days, sometimes whole weeks, coming round to find dozens of anxious calls and texts from his friends and parents, worried that something terrible had happened to him. He'd frequently find himself in rooms he didn't recognise, sometimes even in cities he never realised he'd gone to. Séb didn't know what was happening to him, but he didn't care, as long as there was Céleste. He loved her. No, he craved her - what was it? Her presence? Her attention, her touch? In actuality, it was none of those things. Céleste had created Séb's addiction to her with vampire's blood and hypnotism. Of course, having no idea that Céleste was a powerful and recklessly debauched vampire, Séb didn't have a clue; his secular upbringing had driven it into him that there were no such thing as vampires, demons, witches or the devil.
She was there every day. Séb had quickly become Céleste's favourite toy. His need for her, his devotion to her, meant that she could take anything from him she wanted, and she did. But, just a few months later, and as suddenly as she had decided she liked him, she changed her mind. She tired of his needy-puppy act; she had drained him of all will and challenge. Since he bored her, she drained him of his blood as well. Late July of that year, one heady evening, before the sun had even set, Céleste killed him. Having so willingly become her thrall, there was an obvious expectation that he would join her slowly expanding coven, but as his strength returned to him so did his senses. Knowing she would come after for him unless he ran, he fled Europe, using up what little cash he had, and left his whole life behind him. A missing persons report was filed by his distraught parents, but factoring in his recent behaviour, and just how much the Parisien police already had on their plate with the rash of disappearances and mysterious murders that had struck the capital of late, little effort was put in to find him.
He changed his name from Sauveterre to Charbonneau and drifted from small town to small town, working his way from Maine down the west coast to Pennsylvania over the course of a year. Séb usually only stayed in one place long enough to feed on a couple of humans, or livestock when he didn't want to rouse suspicion, and make enough money working behind bars to move on to the next town. He worked and traveled at night and slept in the day in whatever cheap hotel permitted late check-outs. After a few months he managed to get enough money together to buy an '85 Chevrolet Caprice that he found for sale on a local driveway. In late October 2015 he arrived in the town of Bellingstone, Western Pennsylvania. When Séb realised that he wasn't the only vampire in town, he hastily presented himself to the coven; though the time he'd spent alone had fostered an independant streak in him, he still craved familiarity and acceptance. Being a young vampire he feared human companionship, knowing how thin his will could be and the damage he would inevitably cause. They began to teach him how to control his urges, how to use the abilities given to him by his vampirism, how he could begin to live an almost-normal life even as a vampire. Although he remains quite a solitary person, often on the periphery of the coven rather than at its heart, he is beginning to view the coven as his family and feels that he has a duty to them for accepting him and teaching him. He was not responsible for the disappearances that occurred in 2016.
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Extra |
Personal Song:
Prince, by DeftonesSéb's '85 Chevrolet Caprice:
Nightwing95,
ivoryrolland95
