Age: 19
Role: Keyboardist
Appearance:
Charlotte is nothing special, at first – average size and relatively thin. He knows he has a somewhat feminine face, but he doesn’t care. He doesn’t really seem to care about anything. He is always smiling and bouncing and going along with things. His diminutive size gives him an advantage – he seems to be able to vanish and reappear without anyone ever noticing where he has gone. He is generally a casual dresser, at least when the band is not on camera – when being filmed he is always in costume. He keeps his hair dyed plain black, because he just likes it that way. His eyes are a dark gray, almost black. He has a piercing on his tongue, though he is thinking about not wearing anything in it anymore.
Personality: He is energetic, childish, ambitious, and always very friendly. Bouncy and playful, he takes it upon himself to keep the others entertained, and that means making them laugh, forcing them to play, forcing them to dance, and more often than not, getting them into heaps of trouble. He is always doing random and seemingly childish things, just to make them roll their eyes and chuckle. He is a bit of an attention-hog, but no one really minds since he isconsidered the baby of the group for a reason. He is like a puppy in many ways, always trying to get the others to look at him or talk to him, or even just snuggle with him. He is adorable and tends to spark peoples’ protective instincts, even as he goes around and stabs them in the back with a prank purely for his own amusement. He is perfectly, childishly awkward in front of a camera – if someone asks him to say something that wasn’t on the script he stammers and hesitates for a while before saying something that is usually almost unintelligible. Unintelligible, but painfully cute. He is a rare boy, who doesn’t mind being taken for small and cute and puppy-like, as long as his friends keep laughing and stay near to him.
That’s not to say that he doesn’t have his issues, however. Char is a terribly insecure person, incapable of so much as sleeping in his dorm alone. He always has to share a room with another member of the band. He generally prefers sleeping in a closet over sleeping in the actual bed, because he feels a little too exposed in the bed. He can be jumpy and a little pathetic, on his worst days. Even the screaming of fans makes him nervous – he clings tightly to the other band members and never reaches out to touch a fan’s hand, let alone hug them. He admires Kenzi and Tag and all the rest for being able to interact comfortably with the fans, but he could never even imagine doing that. So much noise and movement terrifies him, but somehow, in spite of that fear, he loves what he is doing.
Likes: Sweet foods, angel-food cake, hot fudge sundaes, marshmallows, s’mores, kittens, puppies, bunnies, all sorts of animals of all ages and sizes, the other members of Vanilla Dream, being cuddles, small spaces, warm places, nightlights, being with someone else, attention, his fans (though they scare him to death), swimming, vacations, mountains, forests, being outside, running around, performing, dancing and otherwise being crazy in hotel rooms, cheering people up, laughter, smiles, being accepted
Dislikes: Spicy foods, sour foods, spiders (he screams like a little girl, but most of that is to make the others laugh), crowds, screaming, loud noises, sudden movements, being hit, pain, bleeding, being cooped up for too long, sleeping in an open space
Dreams: He wants to see Vanilla Dream reach the top, more than anything else.
Fears: He is terrified of crowds, loud noises, sudden movements, thunderstorms, spiders, loss, and being rejected. Mostly, he is afraid of his father.
Quirks: His father left him with serious fears of abuse – never having been permanently adopted left him with self-esteem issues. He does not believe that he is really worth anything. He is always afraid that he will be cast aside like some unwanted toy.
On a happier note, he spends a lot of time rolling around on the ground, part of the reason he has been compared to a puppy so many times. He sits on the floor, he eats on the floor, he plays on the floor. He likes to stick close to his friends, even if that means keeping to the floor and leaning on their legs. It also makes them laugh when he rolls around down there, so he does it even more.
History: Charlotte was the son of a prostitute and a high-class drug addict, who both expected him to be a girl. His mother named him Charlotte, because it was the only thing either of them had been able to think of. Oddly enough, it was the only thing Charlotte ever liked about himself. His mother packed him up and sent him off to live with his father, Thomas McKenzie. The man was a powerful members of society, a great influence. A politician and a businessman, he had the money to offer Charlotte anything the boy would ever need.
That does not mean he offered it.
Charlotte grew up largely on his own. He taught himself to cook and shop and make and save money. The only thing that he picked up from his father was fear. The man was abusive and dangerous – a drug addict, a drunk, and a thief. Whatever money he found of Charlotte’s, he stole, so the boy had to learn to hide it very well. Thomas McKenzie would shout and scream and even beat Charlotte, but it was not until the boy was ten years old that the worst happened. In a drunken blur, the businessman raped his son.
That was when McKenzie finally called the police.
He was put into the system. He bounced from foster home to foster home for eight years, and no one ever adopted him permanently. The happiest thing that happened to him, in all that time, was the keyboard that his second foster family bought for him when he was twelve. He learned to play the keyboard under their roof, and he loved them dearly. They kept him for five years, and Charlotte was sure he had found a home, but then they sent him on his way.
His last foster home before he struck out on his own is barely a memory to him. His home life was barely nonexistent – he fell in with a high-school group of boys who shared his interests in music, fashion, and a future of performance. They learned to play together, sing together, work together as a team. Those boys became the center of his life, the most important things to him. More important than life itself. His foster parents faded into the back of his mind, and soon enough he was an adult, and he struck out with Vanilla Dream for a live of adventure and fortune.
He never quite left his father’s torture behind, however. He is still afraid to sleep alone, afraid to sleep in the open. He cries if someone shouts at him, jumps at fast movements, hides his possessions as though someone in the band might want to steal them. He will be forever scarred by the man who gave him life.