Role: The Second Boy
Gender: Male
Nickname(s)/Alias(es): People sometimes refer to him as ‘Joe’ or ‘Joey’, as a superficial form of familiarity, but he never calls himself either of these things.
Age: 19
Love Interest: Not yet needed.
Past Lover: The Second Girl [Arteryu Suzuki]
Appearance: When looked at in the eyes, it is clear that Joseph’s are ‘blue’. That is indisputable, but they are somewhat fairer than that—more ‘azure’ than the traditional ‘blue’ of a crayon. On the other hand, his hair is brown, but it’s on the darker end of the spectrum, sometimes bordering on black in low-light. This, however, is a more recent development. When he was younger, Joseph’s hair was fairer—perhaps more of a bright chestnut in shade—but that seems to have dulled with age. It’s also somewhat coarser now, often piecing and texturizing, rather than falling in fine individual strands, and so Joseph prefers to keep it fairly short along the sides so that it doesn’t irritate the tops of his ears. Nevertheless, he does let the front grow out a bit: it falls into a row of bangs that he often ends up having to shove to his right when it falls into his eyes. It’s a pain, but it just grows too damn fast to keep up with, and it keeps some of the sun off of him.
After all, beneath that hair, his skin tone is naturally quite fair. However, there are occasionally faint patches of pink seen across it, particularly along his forearms or cheekbones, from whenever he ventures outside. Joseph always had the inconvenience of burning very easily. When he was a child, his father used to put him in ridiculous hats or set him underneath an awning, and despite today being an advocate of the practicalities of sun block, the protection will sometimes sweat off of him by the end of the day or just not be strong enough. Fortunately for him, he has always healed fairly quickly. The only scar he has left over, in spite of all his falling about as a child, is to the right side of his knee where he gauged himself on some broken ceramic pottery.
Of course, ‘cosmetics’ were never Joseph’s primary concern when it came to burns or injury, anyway; rather, it was always something like skin cancer, infection, paralysis, death… or just the immediate inconvenience of pain. He had long come to decide that his strengths would have to lie outside of such shallow, and yet admittedly socially-pivotal, realms such as beauty, and as such, Joseph rarely gives much thought to it now, in spite of any changes that may occur. A late-bloomer physically, he was extremely short as a child—pushing 4’5” longer than anyone ever should—and then once he finally did get his growth spurt, it left Joseph in that uncomfortable ‘string bean’-looking phase for most of his late adolescence. Even now that he has mostly grown into his frame, some might still look at him and call him disproportionate. Joseph can run, jump, climb, swim… all of the basics needed for his purposes of general scientific exploration, but he probably wouldn’t do well locking shoulder-to-shoulder in a game of American Football. Visible muscle just doesn’t build on him, and yet at the same time, he’s not perceptually ‘delicate’ enough to make it seem like it’s purposeful.
Preferred Clothing: Often clothed in darker shades such as blacks, browns, dark reds, etc., his choice of colors serve a practical role: they show grime less easily. Joseph also rarely wears shorts, even in the summertime, so as to have less burnable-skin showing than is necessary. Instead, he chooses between different fabric weights: heavier in the cold and lighter in the heat. On his feet, he often wears black leather shoes with rubber soles for traction, but he’ll sometimes toss a larger pair of rubbers on top of them if he plans to wade out into a swamp. Oddly, for all of the flack he used to get for his appearance when he was young, objectively-speaking, Joseph has always tended to be a fairly sharp dresser, even if the pieces themselves are not particularly expensive. Overall, his clothes look far too clean and tailored to be taken outside, and it would not be uncommon to see him in a tie while taking soil samples. That being said, it may simply be that Joseph cannot be bothered to stock two sets of wardrobes. After all, he spends just as much of his time digging through encyclopedias and obscure medical texts as he does out in the field, and in those settings, his almost-academic style of dress seems far more appropriate. The bees aren’t going to raise a fuss over a dress shirt, but the librarian might kick him out for turning up in sweats.
Height: 5’11”
Weight: 151 lb
Hair Color: Dark Brown
Eye Color: Azure (Blue)
Notable Features: Without a doubt, Joseph would assume his most notable feature to be his black, horn-rimmed glasses. While not a part of him in the strictest sense, he has held onto the same general style since he was six years old and first got the prescription. At the time, they were way too big for his face, but now they seem to almost fit. They’ve been stepped on, dropped in the lake, left in the stacks and otherwise pulverized, but every time he gets a new set to replace them, he get’s the exact same style with a second to spare. At this point, to choose anything else would seem to him like switching out a part of his face. Whether that would be for the better or for the worse is difficult to say.
Personality: Like any true, aspiring academic, Joseph is first and foremost inquisitive. He always wants to know why, how… He is always asking questions, something that drives his teachers insane in class. Even once they give him an answer, he wants to know how he could know for sure that they’re right. A constant devil’s advocate, Joseph can inadvertently come across as argumentative at times, but he can’t seem to help it. He seems to see flaws in all forms of reasoning, including his own. He is unendingly skeptical and feels some level of doubt for almost everything. Even upon coming to a conclusion, Joseph still feels like he needs to find proof that his conclusion isn’t simply a figment of his own biases or preconceptions.
Of course, while the questioning itself may remain annoying to some, overall, this general mindset is considered a positive in science… to be uncertain, to never get too comfortable with any one law or hypothesis. However—fortunately or unfortunately—for him, this cynicism for the surrounding universe is not simply a hat that Joseph chooses to wear when he is working. It’s all the time… which means that such tendencies often seem to bleed their way into less ‘appropriate’ settings.
He’s the one to question the existence of altruism at a charity event: Does anyone really do anything for anyone else, or is it really just to make oneself feel better? He’s the one to lecture a priest on the fallacies of intelligent design at a wedding or point out the inaccuracies of scale in the token ‘baking soda volcano’ at a grade school science fair. He has no room in his ‘proof’-based belief system for the supernatural, the mystical, the fanciful or the fictional, and he has no qualms expressing this to others. Joseph is not entirely oblivious; he notes that, often, people’s reactions to this are not favorable, and he can see that some might view it as inappropriate. He just doesn’t understand why. Wouldn’t everyone rather just know these things? In his mind, he’s simply doing everyone a favor… getting them to question things in the same way that he does. This can make him appear arrogant, but he genuinely believes that it’s better for them to find out now.
He acknowledges that their feelings or pride may be hurt, but he seems to process this predominantly on an intellectual level. This can make it difficult for Joseph to attach to others or for them to attach to him. He appears largely disconnected from the role that emotions play in the lives of the rest of humanity. To him, they are biological reactions to stimuli… reflexive, unpredictable, distracting to rational thought. It’s not that he feels nothing himself, but it can appear this way, making him seem by nature to be cold or indifferent. Rather, this was once a more conscious move on Joseph’s part that has, over time, become something much more automatic. He has purposefully striven to allow reason to take the forefront in his consciousness, not for the sake of others’ opinion of him but for the sake of himself and his own general sanity. It allows him to look at things more objectively, and perhaps more importantly, it gives him a sense of control and a sense of stability in a world that never will be. A large painting falls off of the wall and just misses him: rather than feel fear for what would have happened had it hit him, he can think of why it fell and how he can make sure it doesn’t happen again. It’s a deeply-embedded distraction… a diversion.
Oddities: Viewing the world from such a distant perspective can sometimes make Joseph seem almost robotically unflappable: A cat is dead in the street in front of him. He puts on a pair of gloves, picks it up while the neighbors stare, drops it in a bag and takes it home to slice apart. On the other hand, there are some matters on which he seems strangely particular. For example, Joseph tends to prefer drinking water (even tap water) from a bottle rather than a cup or a glass, as it is less likely to spill as he multi-tasks. He also has the tendency of talking to himself when trying to put various points of thought together, often drawing out charts in the air with his left index finger, even if there’s someone else standing straight in front of him. When it comes to note taking, he prefers paper rather than digital and has multiple three-ring binders and spiral notebooks of paper organized by date in his room. Every night, he keeps a brief summary log of the day’s findings, almost like a journal but far more clinical in nature. He is very private about this.
Charm Points: To some, his scientific curiosity and investigative nature might be considered a positive. Likewise, his honest assessments, however unfiltered they may be, might provide others with helpful alternative perspectives, as long as they’re actually asking for some.
Likes: Joseph enjoys his quiet and his privacy, but that does not mean that he’s an isolationist. Field research is admittedly essential to any enterprise, but he’d rather go out into the world when he decides that it’s necessary. Joseph appreciates the outdoors but mostly because there’s a great deal to see; likewise, his desire to read is motivated more by the knowledge he gains than from the enterprise itself. He has a great affinity for anything caffeinated, whether it’s coffee, chocolate, etc. and has something of a weakness, in particular, for fancy pastries, despite the heaps of evidence proving how unhealthy they are. At night before going to sleep, he enjoys digging through various wiki sites, checking the footnotes, researching and editing the various assertions he sees made there, and in the morning, waking up to the sound of his favorite animal—birds—particularly in live, non-recorded form, is a sure way for him to start the day energized. Museums and archives are his two favorite places outside of his own home, but he enjoys wandering into more unfamiliar environments, as well.
Dislikes: Despite his love of caffeine, there is one caveat: Joseph does not like soda, energy drinks or anything else with carbonation, including sparkling water. Flat soda is alright on principle, but he doesn’t have any particular desire to drink it. On the other hand, he outright avoids alcohol or any recreational drugs, not for any purposes of legality but simply because he doesn’t like the idea of any sort of diminished or altered cognition. Joseph also cannot stand any works of fiction, whether they are novels, movies, audio programs, plays, etc., as he finds them distracting to the mind, whether it be his or someone else’s. Neither does he have a great appreciation for the more static visual arts, such as paintings or sculptures, but unlike works of fiction, he sees nothing wrong with them. He just doesn’t get the point anymore. Music is another case. He is again, firmly against it, but not for everyone, simply for himself. Unless it is ‘New Age relaxation’ nature sounds with extended harmonious tones, he does not care for it. He can appreciate its general form and mathematical structure, but he also finds its purposes to be too emotionally stirring and therefore tends to avoid it.
Hobbies: Sharpshooting is one of his most favored non-academic pastimes, due to the concentration and focus it requires, but oddly enough, he finds it very relaxing. Joseph is also an avid collector of various insects, leaves, branches, rocks, shells and feathers. He catalogues them, photographs them and then coats whatever is appropriate for preservation, sending some of it back home for storage. He appreciates games of strategy such as chess, but he was always bothered by the fact that he required another individual to play against. With time, he has taken more and more to computer-based strategy games, but he still tends to prefer the physical world when possible and devotes very little of his overall time to such pursuits, still completing ‘no partner required’-tasks like the morning crosswords or Sudoku in their original paper form.
Fears/Phobia(s): Although perhaps not possessing enough conscious acknowledgement of fear to have an outright phobia, there are several things that Joseph would consider himself ‘wary’ of. For one, he does not care for sleeping, due to the fact that he does not care for dreaming. Of their content, he has no say, and despite having many times attempted lucid dreaming, he has not managed to accomplish this with any consistent success. Likewise, he does not wish to ever become wholly dependent upon another person, either physically or emotionally. He is concerned with being told some sort of myth or fallacy without his knowledge and accidentally believing it. He is uncomfortable with the thought of being made to make decisions, the back-and-forth in his head often making it difficult to commit firmly to one stance or another, particularly if it would then be too late to change his mind afterward. He is always concerned that he might somehow lose a hold on his emotions, and that this may end up clouding his judgment. In all of these areas, there is a common thread: not necessarily a loss of control, since his more rational side would have to acknowledge that there may be no such thing as control within the universe. It is a fear of not feeling in control, although he would never put it that way himself.
Skills: Joseph has become a very strong marksmen after all of his practicing and is also rather agile, allowing him to scale vertical surfaces fairly easily. He has a keen mind for matters of science and mathematics and a good ear for music, in spite of his personal distaste for it. He was instructed in piano as a child and has relatively advanced technical skill. However, even if he was to play again—something which he does not want—he would most likely not sound ‘good’, since he would be unwilling to put any sort of emotion behind it. Joseph also has a very strong sense of direction and rarely ever gets lost, even when deep in the forest or off in some lake. Even though he never has the time, resources or desire for it, anymore, he does have some past experience with sailing.
Personal History: Joseph was, as they put it euphemistically, ‘a surprise’. The doctors claimed long ago that his mother could have no children, both in that the odds were against her and that it would be too much of a health risk. However, when his mother found out that she was somehow pregnant, even strangely enough, at the age of 44, they decided to go ahead and bring the child to term, despite her age and the many dangers involved. In the end, this decision proved to be her downfall, and the woman died in childbirth.
Of course, Joseph never learned of such details until later in life. His father never blamed him for the death. He told his son that his mother had to go away about a year after his birth simply because it was ‘her time.’ Now, she was in a ‘better place’ with spirits and sunshine and all sorts of wonderful things. Joseph, he said, was a ‘miracle,’ and the child believed him.
He had a happy home life. His father was the head of a decently-sized religious organization in a lower-middle class suburban neighborhood. He was never rich, but he also seemed to possess a decent expendable income relative to his neighbors. He may have been a busy man, but he always kept his son in mind first, sending him to reading classes in the mornings, teaching him piano in the evenings and, as he got older, taking him sailing on the weekends. Eventually, Joseph began to ask questions, questions about everything, and the man hired a tutor for the parish to watch over him, careful to do his best to protect his child’s innocence. For every question, they had an answer, and the man promised that, even though Joseph’s mother was gone, he would always be there instead. He would always be there to guide him, and Joseph believed it. He believed everything: in Santa Clause, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, the Boogie Monster and all the stories from their spiritual texts. He had no reason not to. His father told him it was so, and his father never lied. Most of all, he wanted to believe him. Even from a young age, Joseph felt like he just needed to.
Then one day, when the boy was about eleven, his father didn’t come home. Instead, there were all sorts of noises outside, and a stranger burst into the house wearing a gray suit. He told the boy not to say anything and then told him to follow along. He called himself the ‘lawyer’. Outside, reporters were yelling out questions about his father. They spoke words like ‘extortion’, ‘cover up’, ‘brain-washing’, ‘cult’… things too big for him to fully understand. In a white office, a smiling woman with big hair asked lots of questions about him and his father, but Joseph didn’t answer. Where was he?
Having no extended family, the boy was sent to a young man’s boarding school a couple of towns over, but it didn’t seem to be far enough. The other kids called him the one with the ‘bad guy dad’. At first, Joseph refused to listen and even got into a few losing-fights over it. After all, this was his father that they were talking about! It was impossible, and for a long time, the boy kept mostly to himself, practicing the piano in the main hall or out on the lake sailing with the older chaperones, mostly just waiting for his father to come back to get him.
Of course, such naïveté couldn’t possibly last forever. Like hell, he fought it, but the more he heard, the harder it was to ignore, and as ashamed as he was to admit it, Joseph began to wonder. Months went by without the boy hearing anything from the man, and although in classes, he started out quite a bit behind, he was sharp and caught on quickly, learning some things that his tutors had never mentioned and other things that seemed to outright contradict them. Unlike his tutor’s fantastic tales and drawings, here, they had pictures. They touched fossils. They saw how insects were preserved in amber for millions of years. It felt so wrong to doubt, but how could he help it? He knew now that Santa wasn’t real, neither was the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy or the Boogie Monster. Had Joseph simply misunderstood everything?
Then, when he was fourteen, Joseph’s father asked for him to come and visit. By now, the boy had learned the full meanings of those reporters’ words. He knew that he had probably not misunderstood, perhaps, except, for one, last thing. Stepping closer, he looked up to that man once again, all sealed in there behind bars but still spinning his smile and words like nothing had ever happened, and Joseph knew that this was their final chance. Maybe he could believe him then; maybe it would give him the strength to believe all of it: He asked for the truth about his mother; he asked about how she died. At first, the man was reluctant to talk about it, and perhaps on some level, Joseph was also reluctant to hear about it, but in the end, he kept on pestering him, even threatening to leave right then and there, so that eventually, his father spoke the truth.
It was enough. Everything from the past three years exploded, and Joseph lashed out at his father, telling him that he now knew everything he had ever said to him was a lie. He claimed that his father probably forced his mother to have him, in the same way that he had forced his followers to give up their money; he said that the man had killed her, even though he knew it wasn’t true… He knew his father had lied to protect him, but he just couldn’t take it. He felt stupid, so stupid for having believed him. Perhaps it wouldn’t have been so bad, if he hadn’t fallen for all of it, if he hadn’t been duped so deeply, so completely… Joseph went on, gripping through the bars, saying that he hated him and that he never wanted to see him again, yelling and cursing until the guards had to pull him away. That night, the school got the call: his father had a heart attack. He was dead.
All that night and into the next, Joseph just sat there in his room. He never did cry for his mother. He had always thought she was happy… but he knew his father wasn’t, and still, he couldn’t cry. All he could feel was anger. Even with the man dead, the boy was angry… angry he had lied, angry he was gone, anger at himself for not feeling differently. Was it his fault? Were they both his fault? He blamed his father for his mother’s death, but Joseph knew damn well that he was the one who really killed her. Why did he say otherwise? Why did he tell him that he hated him when he knew deep down that he didn’t? He knew that he had wanted to hurt him, but now the man’s heart had stopped. Had Joseph broken it somehow? Did he want for this to happen? Would his father have even lied, even stolen, were it not for him? This had all gotten so out of hand…
One on top of the other, the questions turned over and over without answers, pushing up from his center into his chest and from his chest into his throat. He hated this. He hated this feeling. This poisonous pot: Guilt, anger, vulnerability, hurt, sadness, confusion… loss—Perhaps it was because of his mother, perhaps it was because of the lies, or perhaps it was because of something else, but Joseph’s mind couldn’t take it. They couldn’t be gone; it couldn’t be his fault. He would go mad. He could feel it. He was about to throw up, burst into tears, maybe both, but then out of nowhere, it hit him:
If he hated it, he should just stop. They should all just stop. His father cared too much about what his son had to say; his mother found too much hope in the thought of her child even existing, and those people were too caught up in the thought of helping their fellow in need. The man was old; it was obvious that his heart wouldn’t take the load of any real stress, particularly while in prison. She was weak; there was no way she would survive any childbirth, particularly at her age. They were poor; they had no right making those donations without getting some kind of proof as to where they were going. Joseph, in turn, was too busy being blindly determined that his father was honest. If he hadn’t bothered to love him—hadn’t bothered to trust him—Joseph would have never cared when he found out what a liar he was. He would have never freaked out.
It was all so magnificently simple. Preventing these messes was well within people’s control. His parents and those others could have been okay, and he could have been feeling differently way right now—out and productive in the world—granted he even still existed. All that they needed to do was stop being idiots and to look at the facts that were right there in front of them: Emotion fogs judgment and attachment is deceiving. They take away your self-control. Don’t trust anything, not even yourself. There is no certainty in the world. You must stay focused to survive, and if you let anyone else affect your rationality, it is your own damn fault.
There was no point in crying now. It was a revelation, and from that point forward, Joseph gave up frivolous pursuits like the piano and focused all of his energy on learning what he could about the world: the real world that was there in front of him. Never again did he take the word of anyone on face value, not even his new teachers. His questioning grew far more aggressive; he took up sharpshooting at a local range, and he withdrew again from his fellow students, spending most of his time in the library or out by himself in the school grounds.
Some people tried to claim that he was ‘traumatized’ by the whole affair, considering how differently, and frankly, without grief or emotion, he seemed afterward. They tried to send him to the school counselors, but it didn’t do any good. He was convinced that matters were better now, and over the next few years, his academics excelled to such an extent that they eventually stopped bothering to question him. He went on to the pre-med track at university will a full scholarship, and despite his excellent marks, mid-way through, the young man made an announcement: He was taking a leave of absence.
Yes, Joseph liked medicine, and yes, he was good at it, but in the end, he was finding that he was disinterested with the actuality of having to practice it. He didn’t want to become a doctor in the traditional sense. He had no desire to learn of ethics or of bedside manner and did not want to waste the rest of his life giving shots for flu or other seemingly-mundane diseases. Perhaps he could pursue research more exclusively, but he still had interest in so many different areas: botany, physics, geology, ornithology, microbiology, the list went on. He wanted to time to think, and although his advisors would have no doubt disagreed, he was no longer the sort to bother asking them, anyway. In his mind, the logical course would be to examine all of the options and then move forward with a fully informed decision, not to simply stay the current course because it was what he happened to fall into.
The question was: Where was he to stay while making this decision? He had some money left to him, but not a lot, and after doing a great deal of investigating involving a comparison between the classifieds of several newspapers, Joseph came across a place known as “Blanchett Manor.” It was cheap, had a room in the attic and large exterior grounds... All in all, it seemed promising enough (he would never use the adjective ‘perfect’), and besides, if he didn’t care for it, he could always find someplace else to stay instead.
Theme Song: SAFETY IN NUMBNESS – PAUL DEMPSEY
Got glue in your feathers
What brought you to this?
A flightless bird surrounded by
Red handed kids
In their borrowed black sheep's clothes
Now everybody's in on the joke
So practice your boredom
Look a thousand times removed
Cause only a freak would sing
In a crowded waiting room
They would turn you out in the cold
Because everybody's in on the joke
Are you missing a stranger
That you might have loved?
Do you feel that there's something
You don't feel enough?
There's a perfectly good poison
For the perfectly numb
If you want some
But naming the feeling
It just, it kills the charade
And if flowers should bloom
Upon your wallpaper face
It will follow you everywhere you go
Because everybody's in on the joke
Desire only burns
And envy's always green
A mind can only race
And a heart, it can only beat
There's these towering neon signs
We must uphold
To keep out the blackness
And run with the blue
Now only a fool would sing
As if he's telling the truth
Could you swallow down
That lump in your throat?
Because everybody's in on the joke
Are you missing a stranger
That you might have loved?
Do you feel that there's something
You don't feel enough?
There's a perfectly good poison....
Are you missing a stranger
That you might have loved?
Do you feel that there's something
You don't feel enough?
There's a perfectly good poison
For the perfectly numb
If you want some
Other: I wanted to note that Joseph’s current personality is likely not be the same personality that he had in his ‘previous life’. As a matter of fact, it’s likely quite opposite, at least in some aspects, since everything that they were punished for the last time—strong emotion, conviction—is gone. I figure that part of the reason why his mind snapped so severely after the death of his father was because of the combined weight of both the losses in this life and those of the previous. Unlike the ideal who ‘rises to the occasion’ in the face of adversity, he’s supposed to be guy the one who somehow ended up collapsing in on himself. Of course, he doesn’t remember any of that past stuff consciously, but there was still some part of him that had already connected ‘people care’ with ‘shit happens all around,’ which may be why he was so determined to believe that everything was all hunky-dory at the start. His psyche would know that he couldn’t take putting it out there again—whether for a lover, a parent, whomever—and it not working. Either way, I thought I should point this discrepancy out, seeing that this newfound defense mechanism could make it more difficult for him and Arteryu to get together a second time.
