-Name: Adam (Lawrence Adam Winchester-McGregor)
-Age: 17
-Gender: Male
-Sexuality: Asexual, Aromantic
-Role: Anti-Fan
-Description: Standing upright at 6'1", Adam has the potential to look fairly imposing. Instead he generally comes off as a lanky teenager with a bad attitude. He's fairly thin - one might assume (correctly) that he's not extremely strong, though he is fairly practiced in pulling himself bodily out of unpleasant situations - and slouches in one direction or another most of the time. He's fairly pale, with thin, straight, poorly taken care of red hair, sharp blue eyes, and freckles that are surprisingly few and far between.
-Adam refuses to wear anything purely decorative; his disposable wardrobe consists entirely of pre-worn tee shirts and jeans. More permanent fixtures include a pair of biking gloves, a brown naugahyde bomber jacket he found in the trash somewhere, a suspiciously new-looking pair of running shoes, and a wallet that conveniently chains to his pants. He owns two backpacks, each of which contains a change of clothes or two and whatever he happened to pick up last time he used it. He only carries one at a time and usually stuffs the other into a nook somewhere where people don't look too often, so I don't know why I'm talking about it in the 'appearance' section.
-Personality: Comes across as a bit of an asshole most of the time. Adam is rather asocial and has a fairly short temper. He is bewildered by a lot of things - intimate relationships, a wide range of emotions, fear, literature - and does his best to avoid them. When he can't he either grudgingly deals with the thing or tries to fight it, usually physically. Talking to people in general isn't much of a problem for him (in that it doesn't bother him; he's sort of bad at it), but he gets uneasy in crowds and compulsory events and has a tendency to get annoyed over insignificant things. He really could not care less how you feel.
-Adam's motivations are fairly alien, even to him. He does some things because he wants to see if he can, or because nobody else is going to, or because they interest him to some extent, but more than anything he functions on inertia; while his actual desire to survive is fairly low, he keeps going because it would take more thought and just as much effort to stop. He occasionally ponders this and concludes that he does not actually care enough to ponder it anymore.
-On the upside, his lack of social capacity allows for a scientific inclination - at least, that's what his middle school counselor had said when she was trying to gently explain to his mother that he was misanthropic and failing English. She was probably right; he has a habit of prodding at things (literally or figuratively) to see what will happen, and if he gives up on running away from them or beating them up he tends to approach problems using the scientific method. His success with this varies, as approaching social problems with the scientific method tends not to work too well.
-Likes:
→ Straightforward People (not all of them, but the idea of them in general)
→ Life Sciences (he's been known to do people's biology homework for cash)
→ Fistfights (rather, the fast, objective thought process that goes with them)
→ Marksmanship (but not gunfights | to his credit, he's not trigger-happy)
-Dislikes:
→ Socializing (crowds and social events, specifically)
→ Questions (especially vague or philosophical ones)
→ Being controlled (by extension: school, home, fear)
→ His full name (it's stupid and belonged to his parents)
-Fears:
→ Losing self-control (all we have to fear is fear itself)
→ Losing his mind (the above applied specifically to thought)
-And to a lesser extent:
→ Crowds (any high volume of people in an enclosed space)
→ Suffocation (this may contribute to his issue with crowds)
-Power: Earth Elemental; the exact implications and limitations of this remain to be seen.
-History:
-Adam's mother birthed him in an attempt at trapping his father in a relationship. It worked, but his family disliked her greatly and responded to the wedding by pulling all his money out from under him, leaving a deteriorating alcoholic romantic and an unemployed and unskilled young man living together in a cheap apartment that they couldn't afford. This is the situation Adam was born into.
-When he was a year old they were evicted and moved to the outskirts of the city. When he was three his mother broke her hip, lost her job, and ultimately became permanently disabled. His father responded by eating a bullet. His mother finished her final argument with his father by giving up on life entirely. Adam was therefore raised mainly by a television and the public school system. His living parent was somewhat abusive when she was feeling energetic, but the vast majority of the time she was just neglectful.
-Elementary and middle school were spent mainly discovering that he disliked everyone. He showed a natural affinity for science, and the two or three science teachers who actually taught their subject were the only teachers who he ever got along with. He made a few friends, mostly little three foot tall delinquents like himself, and while he would go over to their homes with and without permission with increasing frequency he never grew extremely close to any of them. They attempted to form a gang in middle school, which Adam participated in more or less because he didn't have anything better to do.
-Come high school his science teacher was the only teacher who was aware of his existence. He ceased attending other classes and mostly ceased staying at his friends' places, having long since stopped going home when he wasn't forced to by concerned teachers and police officers. The middle school 'gang' formed into something a bit more coherent and he mostly stopped participating, though he was still occasionally conscripted to help out with some petty crime or another. Homeless shelters and abandoned buildings became frequent rest stops. He continued occasionally attending science classes despite having technically dropped out of high school, and nobody noticed except the science teacher, who continued to give him assignments because "it's not like you don't have a shitton of time on your hands anyway."
-It was early in Adam's lack of a high school career that the Poetaster and the Singing Dolls showed up, as well. They were remarkable, attracting the praises and attention of all sorts of people - they even motivated his mother to leave her house on a couple of occasions (or so claimed a few acquaintances who recognized her at the concerts they attended). Adam admitted to the people who insisted upon asking that they were pretty good, objectively, although he never really understood the point of music that was that distracting. A couple of people punched him over this. He punched them back.
-There came a point, though, where he had to admit to himself that on some level their lyrics intrigued even him, and that he was not at all comfortable with this fact. There was nothing the Poetaster said that interested him, yet a part of him wanted to listen. He tried to ignore it at first. It was a small part of him, after all; the same kind of part that used to wonder why he was different or what he was missing before he came to the realization that he didn't actually care. However, he found fairly shortly that ignoring it meant ignoring the intrigue of the Poetaster and the Singing Dolls, meant ignoring every poster, every fan, every song of theirs that came on the radio - they'd grown too popular to truly avoid. So instead he combated it.
-It didn't really take much for Adam to tilt his neutrality toward the Poetaster and the Singing Dolls into the realm of dislike. He'd never cared for the genre of music. His mother was supposedly a fan of them, and that was never a good sign. He didn't care for herd behaviour on any level, especially if he was expected to participate. And regardless of how he felt about it, nobody else seemed particularly intent upon standing up against them - if a band was that popular there had to be somebody willing to vandalize their posters and get in fights with their fans. So, he went out and bought a few cans of spray paint.
-Over the past few years vandalizing Singing Dolls merchandise and getting in fights with die-hard fans has become something of a hobby to Adam. Sometimes it's stress relief, sometimes it's an experiment (What kind of response will I get if I do this?), but mostly it's routine. He doesn't really know if people know he's the guy who paints over all the Poetaster's posters, and he doesn't really care.
-Etc:
→ Adam sometimes listens to classical music. It helps him focus.
→ He can sort of play the harmonica, but doesn't very often. He learned at the bidding of his friends.
→ He owns a handgun that used to belong to his father. He pulled it out of a drawer when he was thirteen and his mother didn't notice for nearly a year. When she did she yelled at him and took it back, but he stole it again in fairly short order.
→ He likes to shoot for fun (personal challenge and alleviation of boredom, not to show off). He can hit a still target fairly consistently, but his attempts at shooting cats and birds have been met with varying levels of success.
→ He tends to try to throw people off balance when he fights and usually aims to knock people down rather than hitting them. His punches are middling at best, but he's moderately nimble and can take quite a bit of damage without ceasing to function.
the sun's up what the hell it was 2am when i started writing this