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Dec. 10th, 2015 06:18 pm
thebigredog: (daddy daddy)
[personal profile] thebigredog


PLAYER
Player name: Mel
Contact: [plurk.com profile] spotters_guide
Characters currently in-game: Lloyd Irving [personal profile] fervence

CHARACTER
Character Name: Clifford Norman
Character Age: 16
Canon: Wilde Life
Canon Point: Shortly after this page in chapter 4.

History:

When Clifford was still a baby, his biological father walked out on his mom. As a result, she left Georgia and moved out to Podunk Oklahoma with Cliff, eventually remarrying and adopting a child. And then nothing much else happens in Podunk until Oscar moves to town when Cliff is sixteen.

Aside from the whole being able to turn into a wolf thing, anyway.

Which is precisely how Cliff and Oscar first meet.

While out on a run to escape his feelings or whatever, Clifford runs afoul of a whole pack of people like him that want him to join them in starting a pack colony in Colorado. They don't take his refusal too well and he winds up passing out on Oscar's porch in his wolf form, exhausted. Oscar discovers said wolf and put him in the bathtub, only to find that the wolf has turned into a half naked teenage boy over night.

Neither is terribly pleased by the situation.

Oscar gives Clifford a hoodie (a hoodie that Cliff will probably never return to him, whoops) and calls his mom to come pick him up, and after Cliff makes him promise not to tell his mom about the whole turning into a wolf thing (which Oscar is still doubtful she's unaware of), they part ways, though not for terribly long.

Cliff calls up Oscar to meet to talk, and in the process they get attacked by a couple of the wolves that menaced Cliff the night before. He turns into a wolf to fight them off and give Oscar a chance to escape and they meet up again after more or less in one piece, Clifford leaving Oscar with his phone number and instructions to call him up if he runs into the wolves again.

Oscar decides to take those directions a bit vaguely, and calls Clifford up to deal with a little....... ghost problem his neighbor is having at the hospital instead. Perhaps against his better judgement, Cliff sticks around and is immediately rewarded with being forced to touch a pregnant woman's stomach (to his extreme discomfort) and getting force choked by a ghost.

It doesn't exactly go well for Oscar either, but everyone comes out of the experience alive, which is honestly the best these two can hope for with their batting average so far.

The important thing is that their friendship manages to solidify in the process, which inevitably leads to Cliff breaking into Oscar's house through an upstairs window because he's physically incapable of just telling Oscar he wants to hang out.

Oscar drags Cliff out to the Farmer's Market in an effort to make him more sociable or something, but Cliff quickly veers off to get some BBQ, which means he's alone when he gets sneak attack grabbed by a stranger at the market and called a wolf. He quite understandably doesn't take the experience all that well, and Oscar finds him smoking alone outside the Farmer's Market with his [Oscar's] hood pulled up.

The next day, Cliff wakes up in Hadriel instead. This is probably one of the few times he can safely say he'd rather be in Podunk.


Personality:

~due to the fact that this webcomic is still relatively early in its incarnation and cliff is a pretty close mouthed kid in general about feelings, i'll be supplementing information provided about clifford in the main canon with stats that the author has dropped about him on their tumblr, which i have print screened and provided below.~


Clifford isn't a friendly kid, let's get that out first and foremost. He's combative, disagreeable, utterly unwilling to talk about his feelings and deeply unable to trust, well, anyone really, but particularly older male influences in his life. He has a history of getting into fights both in and out of school, and his mom has more or less gotten used to the idea of Cliff coming home with a black eye or split lip or something. She worries, he grumbles and pushes her away and then feels awful about it, and the pattern continues again because he refuses to learn from it.

He also smokes, drinks and steals, but will get into that a bit later down in the flaws section.

The problem is that while Clifford more or less has a handle on his wolf side, his human side is... struggling. Before Oscar moves to Podunk and Cliff gets drawn into his entire mess, the supernatural and weird is pretty much entirely encapsulated within Clifford's own body, and as a result Cliff is wary of letting anyone too close lest they see something in him that scares or disturbs them.

He's different, that's undeniable, and he's well aware that different isn't always received with the best of intentions.


Cliff is a scared kid that's never had anyone to explain things to him, and the best way he's found to protect himself from people possibly hurting him is to hurt them first. Or push them away so many times that they finally stop trying.

Because the fact of the matter is, Cliff might have slightly unnerving eyes, might be able to turn into an intimidatingly large wolf, might have all the social graces of a honey badger, but he's just a kid.

And not even a particularly dangerous one at that.

"Monster" is a term he'd really rather avoid, which is why he mostly just avoids people as a general rule of thumb.

That doesn't mean that Clifford is entirely unsociable, however. Despite all of the trouble he causes for his mom, he cares about her deeply and is well aware of how much she's done for him over the years. He doesn't like making her worry with all of his silence and avoidance, especially in recent years, but is terrified of the possibility that sharing with her will just make their relationship even worse.

Cliff's also incredibly fond of his younger brother. They fight a little, of course, because they're brothers and that's what brothers do, but before Oscar comes into the picture his brother is probably the closest relationship Clifford has with anyone in Podunk.

He has a crush on a girl at school, but the less said about that the better because that's not going so great. It's Clifford, he doesn't actually know how to be honest about liking people, and that means he tends to be rude and abrasive instead.

And then there's Oscar. Before Oscar, Cliff didn't have the best history with older male authority figures. His biological dad hadn't exactly set the best precedent by walking out on his mom, and while he mostly got on okay with his step-dad when he was younger, it's insinuated that as of late he's been Clifford's primary motivation for avoiding the house.

This meant that Oscar had a bit of a hard time getting Cliff to trust him at first, but after a handful of shared dangerous experiences and Oscar's continued offer of ungrudging support, Cliff's softened to the man a bit, to the point where he actually actively seeks out Oscar's company via breaking and entering.

Once Cliff trusts someone enough to relax around them, he can be a snarky little asshole, but in a good way. No really. Because once you get past the big furry elephant in the room Cliff's just like any other obnoxious teenage boy.

He likes BBQ, playing cards with ghosts, lone houses in the woods, and showing off his powers in a positive environment. He uses old as an insult and is almost always bored in Podunk.

The best way to get Cliff to trust you is to show him that the werewolf thing doesn't actually bother you at all, even better if you're at least mildly impressed by it.

And while he'll make a whole lot of noise about things being too much trouble or not his problem, he's proven himself one more than one occasion to be willing to put himself in danger in order to help complete strangers if he can. He gets into a fight with a pair of "werewolves" to protect Oscar, sticks around in an uncomfortable situation at the hospital when Oscar asks despite not having the slightest idea how to handle a ghost problem and he's just... he's trying, okay?

Long story short, Clifford is a shitty teenager with authority problems, a weird sense of humor and a general distrust of the world around him. He's bad at the friend thing, bad at the son thing, but at the end of the day he's honestly a good kid.

Just don't ever accuse him of that to his face.


And for some reason he's afraid of dogs. Yeah, I don't get it either.

Inventory:
  • clothes- jeans, t-shirt, sneakers, oscar's hoodie, an assortment of thick colorful jelly bracelets, tongue piercing.
  • cigarettes and a lighter- i mean, i don't think i need to explain this one.
  • cell phone and wallet- same.
  • pack of playing cards - how else are you going to spend time with a ghost anyway.

Abilities:
i saw a werewolf with a chinese menu in his hand...

First and foremost it's important to point out that though Cliff calls himself a werewolf for lack of a better term, that's not actually what he is. He isn't affected by the full moon, he can't do any sort of partial transformation, and aside from his undeniably wolfish eyes, there's nothing special or powered about him in his human form.

He's just a kid that can turn into a very very large wolf.

Technically, he's what the Native Americans refer to as an Animal Person. Animal People don't so much change form, as possess two forms at once, the human and the animal, and can switch between the two seamlessly at will. This means that changing from human to wolf doesn't shred or destroy his clothes because the clothes simply stay with his human body while he runs around as a wolf.

The one notable exception being Cliff's tongue piercing, which, being made of metal (and possessing all the mystic equivalents that certain metals are prone to in various myths) remains in both forms.

Flaws:


When it comes to shitty teenage behavior, Clifford is quite possibly the king. If there's a morally questionable hobby that teenagers are known for, Cliff has probably done it. Drinking, smoking, theft and vandalism, and of course, getting into fights. He also has absolutely zero shame for any of these activities, aside from perhaps the worry he sometimes causes his mom as a result.

Of course, that doesn't actually stop him doing any of them either.
Cliff also has the shitty teenager attitude to match. He yells instead of dealing with his feelings, thinks everything is boring or stupid and doesn't understand the concept of privacy or personal space when it's not his own.

He's mistrustful, quick to judge, and he'd much rather run from his problems than confront them, or at least, confront them in a positive manner since confrontation is something Cliff excels at.

He genuinely hates being touched, and will usually respond to any such overtures with violence, yelling, or putting as much physical distance as he possibly can between himself and the other person; tucking his hands behind his back or attempting to make himself a smaller target in general.

This doesn't actually get better if he trusts you either, and applies just as equally in his wolf form as his human one (people tend to touch animals more freely than humans and fail to realize that taking on an animal's shape doesn't change Cliff's mind, and unintentional Bad Touches™ can occur as a result). Just don't touch him.


There's also been hints from the author that, while Clifford doesn't currently have any issue with blurring the lines between his wolf and human self, it has the potential to become an issue further down the line, as well as more than a few indications that his tendency towards violence which is still mostly harmless right now won't always be so either. But that's in the future, for now he's just one hot mess of a sixteen year old boy.

In summary:



SAMPLES
Action Log Sample:

Why are you so shitty?

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Clifford Norman

December 2015

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