( realityshifted )
Dec. 5th, 2013 10:11 pmPlayer: DJ
Journal:![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
whitelighter
Contact: eeveester{@}gmail.com / aim psitaniums /![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
biomagnet
Timezone: EST
Other characters: Sissel (d2)
Character: Neal Caffrey
Series: White Collar
Deviance: d2. Neal is an immortal a la Highlander: The Series, although he is still within his first "life" and is very much a babby. Peter Burke, Alex Hunter and Vincent Adler are the other notable immortals currently in Neal's life. (Only Adler is actually over 100. Baby immortals everywhere.)
Age: 44 (physically stuck at 31, everyone thinks he's 32)
Gender: Male
Species: Immortal human
Canon used: White Collar TV show / Highlander, Highlander: The Series, Highlander: Endgame and Highlander: The Search for Vengeance. (Shut up, things that will happen in the distant future still fucking count.)
Appearance:
Psychology: KAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAATE
a 12 y/o.
Skills / abilities: Neal is a very, very talented man. On top of his effusive charm and weapons-grade intellect, he is capable of high-profile thefts and art forgeries that can stand up to professional scrutiny. If it's anything illegal that is not related to violence, Neal has probably at least dabbled in it or understands some of the processes behind it. He is an expert marksman, but deeply resents guns after the betrayal of his father.
Aside from those mundane skills, Neal is immortal. After his first death at age 31, he no longer ages or sustains injury of any level. Although he is young and his power is not very strong, even grievous wounds will heal completely by the next day if not within a few hours. (However, there are a few exceptions to his rule: Neal cannot regrow limbs or heal injuries to his neck, and great damage to his face or skull can leave definite scarring, a la Colin MacLeod.) He cannot get sick; his immune system is literally electric and bug zaps the hell out of any virus or contagion. Most importantly: Neal comes back from the dead. This obviously takes longer than wounds but, barring decapitation, he can revive from anything. As an advanced warning system between his kind, Neal experiences "the Buzz," which is the sound/sensation in the brain of another immortal's presence; this sense has a longer horizontal range than vertical, meaning that he could sense someone across a house but not necessarily from the second floor. Immortals also possess an inexplicable hammerspace in their jackets to completely conceal the swords with which they fight (Neal tends to use it for more mundane objects at times because he is a free-thinker who was never really taught the rules in the first place).
Weaknesses: Neal does not know how to fight. As mentioned above, he can use guns but will not do so willingly.Not until the s2 finale, anyway. For being in shape, he could easily be overpowered and has a regular human constitution. Decapitation is Super Effective.
History: The canonical history of Neal Caffrey. At his current canon-point, nothing of gigantic significance has happened to drastically alter the show's plot and throw things off track; the point of starting him so early is to establish how his immortality and different start to life affects his relationships with those around him in the current day. We also want to see how badly we can fuck up canon by introducing the Plane and the resources therein.
Born on March 21st, 1965, Neal was discovered and subsequently adopted by James Bennett and Mrs. Caffrey-Bennett. He was raised in Washington, DC with his family as an only child, believing his police officer father to be someone worth idolizing. He learned how to shoot a gun and the basics of law enforcement. When Neal was fourteen years old, his father was arrested for suspicion of murdering a fellow cop — as Neal's mother was involved in the case, she was placed within WitSec, along with a fellow officer that had witnessed the incident (Kathryn Hill) and Neal himself. Neal George Bennett became Danny Brooks. For the next four years until his legal emancipation, Danny was determined to become everything his father—or, the idealization of his father—was against. Not a terrible person, no, but someone who was beyond the law and would never be caught. He learned how to shoplift, pick pockets, make simple forgeries. Useful tools that would aid him in getting what he wanted without having to give up anything in exchange.
When Danny finally hit eighteen years old in 1983, he left behind both his mother and his old name. Neal Caffrey was born. He moved to New York in order to find better opportunities. A few years on his own, and Neal managed to catch the eye of another young man simply called Mozzie after managing a particularly nice (if low-stakes) con. Mozzie took Neal underneath his wing and together they learned the ins and outs of the con, established deep connections in the black market, and generally made names for themselves through skill, wit and charm. They would work together on and off for the next thirteen years, sometimes taking their own jobs on the side whenever it suited them, until an ill-fated deal went down in France, 1996. Neal had gone to an exchange alone with a supposedly-trustworthy client to exchange goods, and instead had his neck snapped, left for dead on the cold warehouse floor.
He awoke several long hours later to deep confusion. Somewhat out of his head, he wandered the streets looking for a safe place to call Mozzie and arrange for a pick-up when he found a place called Le Blues Bar. As soon as he entered, he was almost bowled over by a strange and invasive buzzing in his head, drawing the attention of the only two patrons in the bar in the mid-afternoon. One was the owner of the bar, Joe Dawson, while the other was an extremely regular patron named Adam Pierson. After some heavy nudging by Dawson, Adam explained to Neal what had happened to him: Neal had died during that exchange, and come back to life as an Immortal. Over the next two days, Adam became Neal's "teacher" and gave him a very bare-bones rulebook for the Game all Immortals played: fights between them are to the death, decapitation being the only permanent death for their kind; holy ground is sacred and no one can fight on it; run when threatened and play dirty when necessary to get out of any fights Neal did not want to participate in. It was this last one that Adam was very insistent on, saying that if Neal could survive the next ten years on his own, then Adam would teach Neal everything he knew.
It was a few years after that, wherein Mozzie learned of Neal's immortality and the two got very good at crafting aliases for a time when Neal would need them for much more personal reasons than a con, that they found their first long con. The mark was named Vincent Adler. Neal would infiltrate his company and eventually earn Adler's trust to the point where Neal could siphon off huge amounts of money in an exchange. Vincent Adler himself was an immortal, but with no real resources to speak of, Neal and Mozzie went in blind to his true age or notoriety in the immortal circles. Adler seemed to view Neal as some sort of protege, not taken in by his usual facade of an older, wiser and jaded man and taught Neal the finer points of life like how to wear a suit. During this time, Neal met a woman named Kate Moreau in Adler's employ and fell in love with her. It was four months later wherein Adler pulled the largest con of all, a brilliantly executed Ponzi scheme, and completely disappeared with almost a billion dollars of his investors' money — including Neal's.
Nine years after his first death (two and a half years after Adler's disappearance), Neal was finally caught on bond forgery and arrested by the only person to match him intellectually: Special Agent Peter Burke. Burke was also an Immortal, as Neal has found out in their first face-to-face meeting when Neal was being a little shit during the Adler con and scoping him out. Despite this fact, Peter never made a move to do more than arrest Neal and put him away for the mortal crimes he committed. It was there that Neal began to really trust Peter over simply appreciating the mental stimulation. Thankfully, Neal's true identity as Neal Bennett was not so easily uncovered and he was able to lie and say he was really 29 upon arrest instead of his actual 40 — it bought him some time to not-age in prison.
Neal patiently waited out his four year sentence in a maximum security federal prison. Four months before his sentence would end Kate decided to end things between them out of nowhere. Her weekly visits stopped and Neal, desperate to chase after her and discover what was wrong, broke out of prison a month and a half later. He was two days too late to find Kate, and all he had to show for it was an empty '82 Bordeaux bottle. Peter showed up soon after to take him back to jail. One week later, Peter (reluctant to leave an immortal in jail for another four years where his unaging nature would start being noticeable) met with him in jail where Neal struck up a deal: let him consult on cases with the FBI while attached to a tamperproof tracking anklet in exchange for a modicum of freedom outside the ever-watching eyes of Big Brother.
Canon continues on relatively unchanged from this point forward. Neal has yet to take even a single head. We currently pick up a short time before episode 1x04: Flip of the Coin.
Canon point: 1x04: Flip of the Coin. (Post-series Highlander.)
Reality description: This world is deeply... normal. On the surface, everything is as it should be: historical events follow the same pattern as our world, governments and their agencies function just the same. One key difference is the existence of immortals: humans who do not age nor die. They age and are injured like normal people until their "first death," wherein they become locked into the age they died, potentially forever. They have their own places in history, large and small, but are generally unknown to the populace due to a community-wide fear of what would happen were the secret to get out. It would be chaos in the streets, handfuls of immortals against the entire planet. Immortals are always foundlings and are completely sterile, making their true origins a mystery to last the ages. (We ignore that one movie that doesn't exist that says immortals are aliens. They are not aliens, shut up.)
Immortals participate in what they call the Game: one-on-one sword fights to the death, wherein the victor decapitates the loser and absorbs all of his power in the form of an electrical storm called the Quickening. Fighting on holy ground is forbidden, and thus makes places like churches and graveyards into havens for those who would live their lives out in peace or at least take a breather from the world. Some immortals are content to take the years as they come and gain as many experiences as possible, while some go insane with the hunt and try to be the last Immortal standing in order to win the Game. As every immortal is human and has just as many complexities as anyone else, there are many other types of people in between these two extremes. Very few immortals resist the call of the Game and manage to survive long afterward. For thousands of years, there has existed a secret society of mortals called the Watchers who chronicle the lives of immortals until the point where the rest of the world will be ready to hear their stories. The vast majority of immortals are not aware of the Watchers' existence.
Neal Caffrey's specific reality is within New York City, New York in 2009. Due to the tracking anklet he wears as part of his deal with the FBI, he is only allowed within a two-mile radius of his residence, although that covers quite a lot of ground and places to go when talking about the Big Apple. Notable locations include the mansion where Neal rents the third-floor apartment from June Ellington, the NYC branch FBI building where he works with the White Collar Crime Division, and the Burke residence (which is, admittedly, outside his radius. This does not stop Neal from visiting whenever he wants).
Notable people:
First-person speaking:
Third-person writing: A PSL for this specific universe. Takes place between 1x01: Pilot and 1x02: Threads.
Did you read the rules? Yes-a-roonie.
Journal:
whitelighterContact: eeveester{@}gmail.com / aim psitaniums /
Timezone: EST
Other characters: Sissel (d2)
Character: Neal Caffrey
Series: White Collar
Deviance: d2. Neal is an immortal a la Highlander: The Series, although he is still within his first "life" and is very much a babby. Peter Burke, Alex Hunter and Vincent Adler are the other notable immortals currently in Neal's life. (Only Adler is actually over 100. Baby immortals everywhere.)
Age: 44 (physically stuck at 31, everyone thinks he's 32)
Gender: Male
Species: Immortal human
Canon used: White Collar TV show / Highlander, Highlander: The Series, Highlander: Endgame and Highlander: The Search for Vengeance. (Shut up, things that will happen in the distant future still fucking count.)
Appearance:
Psychology: KAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAATE
a 12 y/o.
Skills / abilities: Neal is a very, very talented man. On top of his effusive charm and weapons-grade intellect, he is capable of high-profile thefts and art forgeries that can stand up to professional scrutiny. If it's anything illegal that is not related to violence, Neal has probably at least dabbled in it or understands some of the processes behind it. He is an expert marksman, but deeply resents guns after the betrayal of his father.
Aside from those mundane skills, Neal is immortal. After his first death at age 31, he no longer ages or sustains injury of any level. Although he is young and his power is not very strong, even grievous wounds will heal completely by the next day if not within a few hours. (However, there are a few exceptions to his rule: Neal cannot regrow limbs or heal injuries to his neck, and great damage to his face or skull can leave definite scarring, a la Colin MacLeod.) He cannot get sick; his immune system is literally electric and bug zaps the hell out of any virus or contagion. Most importantly: Neal comes back from the dead. This obviously takes longer than wounds but, barring decapitation, he can revive from anything. As an advanced warning system between his kind, Neal experiences "the Buzz," which is the sound/sensation in the brain of another immortal's presence; this sense has a longer horizontal range than vertical, meaning that he could sense someone across a house but not necessarily from the second floor. Immortals also possess an inexplicable hammerspace in their jackets to completely conceal the swords with which they fight (Neal tends to use it for more mundane objects at times because he is a free-thinker who was never really taught the rules in the first place).
Weaknesses: Neal does not know how to fight. As mentioned above, he can use guns but will not do so willingly.
History: The canonical history of Neal Caffrey. At his current canon-point, nothing of gigantic significance has happened to drastically alter the show's plot and throw things off track; the point of starting him so early is to establish how his immortality and different start to life affects his relationships with those around him in the current day. We also want to see how badly we can fuck up canon by introducing the Plane and the resources therein.
Born on March 21st, 1965, Neal was discovered and subsequently adopted by James Bennett and Mrs. Caffrey-Bennett. He was raised in Washington, DC with his family as an only child, believing his police officer father to be someone worth idolizing. He learned how to shoot a gun and the basics of law enforcement. When Neal was fourteen years old, his father was arrested for suspicion of murdering a fellow cop — as Neal's mother was involved in the case, she was placed within WitSec, along with a fellow officer that had witnessed the incident (Kathryn Hill) and Neal himself. Neal George Bennett became Danny Brooks. For the next four years until his legal emancipation, Danny was determined to become everything his father—or, the idealization of his father—was against. Not a terrible person, no, but someone who was beyond the law and would never be caught. He learned how to shoplift, pick pockets, make simple forgeries. Useful tools that would aid him in getting what he wanted without having to give up anything in exchange.
When Danny finally hit eighteen years old in 1983, he left behind both his mother and his old name. Neal Caffrey was born. He moved to New York in order to find better opportunities. A few years on his own, and Neal managed to catch the eye of another young man simply called Mozzie after managing a particularly nice (if low-stakes) con. Mozzie took Neal underneath his wing and together they learned the ins and outs of the con, established deep connections in the black market, and generally made names for themselves through skill, wit and charm. They would work together on and off for the next thirteen years, sometimes taking their own jobs on the side whenever it suited them, until an ill-fated deal went down in France, 1996. Neal had gone to an exchange alone with a supposedly-trustworthy client to exchange goods, and instead had his neck snapped, left for dead on the cold warehouse floor.
He awoke several long hours later to deep confusion. Somewhat out of his head, he wandered the streets looking for a safe place to call Mozzie and arrange for a pick-up when he found a place called Le Blues Bar. As soon as he entered, he was almost bowled over by a strange and invasive buzzing in his head, drawing the attention of the only two patrons in the bar in the mid-afternoon. One was the owner of the bar, Joe Dawson, while the other was an extremely regular patron named Adam Pierson. After some heavy nudging by Dawson, Adam explained to Neal what had happened to him: Neal had died during that exchange, and come back to life as an Immortal. Over the next two days, Adam became Neal's "teacher" and gave him a very bare-bones rulebook for the Game all Immortals played: fights between them are to the death, decapitation being the only permanent death for their kind; holy ground is sacred and no one can fight on it; run when threatened and play dirty when necessary to get out of any fights Neal did not want to participate in. It was this last one that Adam was very insistent on, saying that if Neal could survive the next ten years on his own, then Adam would teach Neal everything he knew.
It was a few years after that, wherein Mozzie learned of Neal's immortality and the two got very good at crafting aliases for a time when Neal would need them for much more personal reasons than a con, that they found their first long con. The mark was named Vincent Adler. Neal would infiltrate his company and eventually earn Adler's trust to the point where Neal could siphon off huge amounts of money in an exchange. Vincent Adler himself was an immortal, but with no real resources to speak of, Neal and Mozzie went in blind to his true age or notoriety in the immortal circles. Adler seemed to view Neal as some sort of protege, not taken in by his usual facade of an older, wiser and jaded man and taught Neal the finer points of life like how to wear a suit. During this time, Neal met a woman named Kate Moreau in Adler's employ and fell in love with her. It was four months later wherein Adler pulled the largest con of all, a brilliantly executed Ponzi scheme, and completely disappeared with almost a billion dollars of his investors' money — including Neal's.
Nine years after his first death (two and a half years after Adler's disappearance), Neal was finally caught on bond forgery and arrested by the only person to match him intellectually: Special Agent Peter Burke. Burke was also an Immortal, as Neal has found out in their first face-to-face meeting when Neal was being a little shit during the Adler con and scoping him out. Despite this fact, Peter never made a move to do more than arrest Neal and put him away for the mortal crimes he committed. It was there that Neal began to really trust Peter over simply appreciating the mental stimulation. Thankfully, Neal's true identity as Neal Bennett was not so easily uncovered and he was able to lie and say he was really 29 upon arrest instead of his actual 40 — it bought him some time to not-age in prison.
Neal patiently waited out his four year sentence in a maximum security federal prison. Four months before his sentence would end Kate decided to end things between them out of nowhere. Her weekly visits stopped and Neal, desperate to chase after her and discover what was wrong, broke out of prison a month and a half later. He was two days too late to find Kate, and all he had to show for it was an empty '82 Bordeaux bottle. Peter showed up soon after to take him back to jail. One week later, Peter (reluctant to leave an immortal in jail for another four years where his unaging nature would start being noticeable) met with him in jail where Neal struck up a deal: let him consult on cases with the FBI while attached to a tamperproof tracking anklet in exchange for a modicum of freedom outside the ever-watching eyes of Big Brother.
Canon continues on relatively unchanged from this point forward. Neal has yet to take even a single head. We currently pick up a short time before episode 1x04: Flip of the Coin.
Canon point: 1x04: Flip of the Coin. (Post-series Highlander.)
Reality description: This world is deeply... normal. On the surface, everything is as it should be: historical events follow the same pattern as our world, governments and their agencies function just the same. One key difference is the existence of immortals: humans who do not age nor die. They age and are injured like normal people until their "first death," wherein they become locked into the age they died, potentially forever. They have their own places in history, large and small, but are generally unknown to the populace due to a community-wide fear of what would happen were the secret to get out. It would be chaos in the streets, handfuls of immortals against the entire planet. Immortals are always foundlings and are completely sterile, making their true origins a mystery to last the ages. (We ignore that one movie that doesn't exist that says immortals are aliens. They are not aliens, shut up.)
Immortals participate in what they call the Game: one-on-one sword fights to the death, wherein the victor decapitates the loser and absorbs all of his power in the form of an electrical storm called the Quickening. Fighting on holy ground is forbidden, and thus makes places like churches and graveyards into havens for those who would live their lives out in peace or at least take a breather from the world. Some immortals are content to take the years as they come and gain as many experiences as possible, while some go insane with the hunt and try to be the last Immortal standing in order to win the Game. As every immortal is human and has just as many complexities as anyone else, there are many other types of people in between these two extremes. Very few immortals resist the call of the Game and manage to survive long afterward. For thousands of years, there has existed a secret society of mortals called the Watchers who chronicle the lives of immortals until the point where the rest of the world will be ready to hear their stories. The vast majority of immortals are not aware of the Watchers' existence.
Neal Caffrey's specific reality is within New York City, New York in 2009. Due to the tracking anklet he wears as part of his deal with the FBI, he is only allowed within a two-mile radius of his residence, although that covers quite a lot of ground and places to go when talking about the Big Apple. Notable locations include the mansion where Neal rents the third-floor apartment from June Ellington, the NYC branch FBI building where he works with the White Collar Crime Division, and the Burke residence (which is, admittedly, outside his radius. This does not stop Neal from visiting whenever he wants).
Notable people:
- Peter Burke is Neal's handler and fellow immortal, and probably the only person Neal can actively trust. He's taken Neal under his wing as an immortal, but puts up with no shit from Neal's antics.
- Elizabeth Burke is Peter's wife and the most kickass lady you will ever meet. She's lovely and amazing. That is all you need to know.
- Mozzie is Neal's partner in crime — literally. Neal and Moz are the best of friends, able to look after each others' backs even in the cutthroat world of criminals. Neal does not quite trust Mozzie with his life, but he does trust the man with his secret of immortality.
- Kate Moreau, Neal's sun and stars. He is madly in love with this woman and currently chases after her since the sudden disappearing act she pulled. Neal does not believe she was acting under her own volition and is desperate to help her despite warnings from all angles saying that she might not be worth the effort.
- June Ellington is Neal's landlady and overall badass woman. Widow of a conman herself, she and Neal have plenty of things in common. She is also Neal's Watcher, believing that with Neal in her house her job will become ten times more interesting than stalking around after sulky immortals. So far, this has proven to be true.
- Adam Pierson, the man who would be Neal's teacher. Despite not being much of a role model, he did teach Neal how to survive and keep out of the Game with the promise to teach him more if Neal could stay alive for ten years. Thirteen years later, and Neal has not heard a peep from the man. (Secretly, Adam is actually the 5,000 year old immortal Methos who had really just intended to yank Neal's chain.)
First-person speaking:
Third-person writing: A PSL for this specific universe. Takes place between 1x01: Pilot and 1x02: Threads.
Did you read the rules? Yes-a-roonie.