noctium app

[ziegfeld]

« PLAYER INFORMATION »

Name: Avery
Are you over 18?: Yes
Contact: PM, superheroic @ plurk
Other characters, if any: none


« CHARACTER INFORMATION »

Character: Henry Dubois IV
Canon: The Diviners Series, by Libba Bray
Canon point: Lair of Dreams, book two. After he finds out that Louis is dead
OU or AU?: OU
Age: 19
Species: Human

« RECORD »


History : There's no wiki with good information for the series, so I'll outline some history in bullet points!

- Henry grew up as southern royalty in New Orleans. They have a mansion called Bonne Chance. His great-great-grandfather stole land from the Choctaw. His great-grandfather made his fortune on the sugar plantation trade, off the backs of slaves. His grandfather was a confederate general. He wonders sometimes if there was ever a single Dubois who did a good thing in their life.

- His father, an exceptionally powerful man always wanted him to become a lawyer and disparaged the fact that he'd always played the piano. His mother, worn down by decades of emotional abuse, spent most of her days in the family graveyard talking to statues of saints. When henry was young, she had tried to kill herself. This was never spoken of again.

- Henry was sent to Philips Exeter Academy from a young age, an elite private boarding school in New Hampshire. He learned latin and science and the particular art of ignoring the constant innuendo about the way he walked and talked.

- When he was 15, he caught the measles and his parents allowed him to stay home for a summer. And he met Louis, a poor Cajun musician who played the fiddle on various boats for pay. They fell in love with each other, and Louis was the first person that Henry told about his newfound ability to lucid dream. At the end of the summer, Henry's father found a love letter Louis had written him, and vowed to send Henry to military school instead as punishment. He ran away, trying to find his lover who couldn't be found, whom everyone assumed had left new orleans.

- Henry ran away to New York and scraped a living as a pianist, trying to make it big. He was living in an apartment with no heat and no water, playing for the famous Ziegfeld follies when he first met Theta. She had run away from her abusive husband after accidentally setting the house on fire with her newfound abilities. Henry gave the starving girl his sandwich, and they've been close as family ever since. When it turned out that theta was pregnant with her ex-husband's child, Henry sold his piano so she could afford an abortion. And every week since then she has stuffed a few dollars in a can marked HENRY'S PIANO FUND.

- They move into a better apartment. Theta becomes one of the famous Ziegfeld girls. But no in showbiz wants to publish his songs. They're not catchy enough. They're too complex to be hummed along to. The people want simple, catchy melodies, and they don't want to sing along to everything Henry pours his heart into.

- Once a week, he goes into the dream world to try and find Louis, to bring him to New York. And in one of these dreams, he meets Ling - a young woman from Chinatown in one of his dreams. Henry is astonished. He's never met anyone who could do the same thing. She has the ability to speak to the dead in dreams. Eventually, they find Louis in his own dream and Henry manages to get his address and send him a train ticket to New York. He waits for hours at Grand Central, but Louis never arrives

- After years of his songs being passed over by the Ziegfeld follies, Henry finally quits his job — or more accurately, storms out. It’s not the smartest thing he’s ever done.

- Throughout New York, a mysterious sleeping sickness is claiming lives, created by a malevolent spirit that feeds off the dreams of the poor. Henry figures out that Louis has been dead for the longest time. Henry is lured in by the possibility of living out a happy dream with his only love. His friends somehow manage to wake him up by banishing the spirit.

Disposition:

Henry Dubois has an ambitious dream, and he doesn't necessarily know when to let go of it. Playing piano is in his blood, embedded in his bones. It's the only thing he's ever wanted to do, and he's sacrificed almost everything he's ever had to get closer to that dream. He left behind a life of wealth and power, and the legacy of being born to the kinds of families that make history books. Leaving all of that was easy for him, even if it meant being propelled into the uncertainty of poverty and being invisible in the big city. All this just for the shot at being able to make music.

He wants the fame and recognition, wants his name spelled out in glittering lights. He wants people to be humming his songs on the street corner. Basically, to be the next Gershwin or Irving Berlin. But he's far too stubborn to change his artistic vision in any way, even if that means sacrificing his shot at making it big.

This stubbornness is something that we see time and time again in Henry. Slipping into the dream world for too long or too often is taxing on his body, but he still does it every night to look for Louis. He does this to the detriment of his work and his health. Despite the warnings from his friends, he never gives up looking for him until he finally discovers that his love is dead. When Henry wants something, he rarely ever gives up. He pursues it with a dogged determination until the very end, even when it'd be easier to quit. It's an unlikely core of steel in a boy that is soft in so many other ways.

Soft in the sense that he never really fit into what it meant to be a man in conservative 1920s society. Even in school, his peers would whisper about how he never quite fit in. Music isn't a prestigious hobby for a man in his social class, and neither is singing or the theater. Henry doesn't even necessarily have the stomach for the kind of racism that's so commonplace in the time period. He rejects the ideas of eugenics that are unfortunately gaining widespread traction and acceptance, and tries to help a Chinese man when he's being searched by the police for his papers in accordance with the Chinese Exclusion Act. In a lot of ways, Henry's pretty progressive for his time, although that doesn't necessarily mean that he's an activist or revolutionary. He doesn't want to change society. He just wants to make art.

Perhaps his distaste for bigotry can be attributed to the fact that he happens to be gay in a time when being caught dancing with another man would send you to a forced labor camp. His sexuality has been the catalyst for a lot of pain in his life - being caught by his father, having to run away from home. Losing the only man he's ever loved. And although he hides it well, he can't help but despair when he hears reports of raids on bars where he used to frequent. It's the kind of despair that's rooted in powerlessness, because he knows that there's nothing he can do.

Henry hides his immense melancholy through jokes and banter, but he doesn't always do a good job of it. Sometimes he drinks too much or will suddenly become quiet in the middle of a party. His mask of geniality is quite well-constructed, and it takes a lot to break it. One example is when he and his friends were in an asylum, and one of them made a disparaging comment about the patients. Mental illness is a sore spot for Henry, because his mother died by suicide when he was a child.

He is immensely fun when his mask is on. He's usually the life of the party, dressing flamboyantly and entertaining everyone with songs he makes up on the spot. He's definitely been arrested for being in an illegal speakeasy during Prohibition. He's got stories.

Above all, Henry tries to be kind, because his family were terrible human beings who built their wealth off the backs of exploited people. His father was abusive and he never lived up to his expectations of manliness. So when he sees someone in distress, he will not hesitate to help them - as he did when he first met his best friend Theta, who was starving and scared to death. He took her into his home, even apologizing for its shabby state. He sold his piano to pay for the abortion that Theta so badly needed, even though that was his most prized possession.


Suitability: Being from the 1920s, Henry will likely be a little bewildered by the difference in technology. He'll probably mess up using the network or stare too long at high-tech cities. However, he also comes from a world where he's discovered that the supernatural does exist. He has friends who can speak to the dead, so Henry has accepted a lot recently. He will be hoping to find a piano, and will probably play endlessly as a coping method. As for his gem, he'll make some quip about how he'd always wanted sapphires.

In many ways, Noctium is actually better for him than his canon setting. Here, he's free to love whomever he wants, dress however he likes without judgement, and generally be himself. He'll miss his best friend Theta immensely, which will probably make him homesick.

Synchrony might be difficult for him for the first little bit. He's basically just found out that his father had the love of his life murdered. But Henry has been seen to flirt casually with handsome men, almost as an idle hobby. He's also quite gregarious and should be able to achieve some sort of intimacy before long.

As for the native gems, Henry would probably compliment them on their beauty, but he wouldn't go beyond that. He'd probably be too intimidated to bond with them, unless he developed quite a bond with one.

Condition upon arrival: Henry is currently afflicted by a mysterious supernatural illness called 'the sleeping sickness'. The victims of this disease cannot be woken up, and people usually die after being afflicted. A supernatural force is feeding off the dreams of people in the city, which is why he can't wake up.

Mentally, he just found out that his father had the love of his life killed. He's absolutely devastated and probably in shock. He's spent the better part of a year dreamwalking to try and find Louis, only to find that he was dead.

I would like for Henry to wake up from his disease completely cured, if possible.

Abilities: Henry is a dreamwalker. Which basically means that he can enter other people’s dreams. He doesn’t usually get to choose which dream he ends up in, but he can manipulate them in subtle ways. In certain instances in the book, he subtly nudges people towards better dreams by suggesting nicer topics when they're having nightmares. Sometimes the dream walking leaves him open to evil forces.

When Henry is engrossed in a dream, he usually doesn't take very good care of himself. He tries to set an alarm to wake himself up, but it doesn't always work. He could dream for hours and not realize how much time had passed, often waking up hungry and disoriented. He cannot move his body for about ten minutes after waking up, but the time varies by how long his trip was. His friends are afraid that if he keeps doing this, one day he'll be stuck there and won't be able to wake up.

Inventory:

1. The clothes on his back: oversized black tuxedo jacket, slim red pants, white shirt and black suspenders
2. One beat-up straw boater hat

Gembond: Sapphire
Gem Location: On his right wrist


« MISCELLANEOUS »


Sample:

(OOC: Used the 'secret garden' prompt from the August TDM)

In many ways, the setting in front of him resembled one of his dreams. The hazy, diffused light and sense of foreboding. This was different from the rest of his dreams, however. Henry knew that as soon as he stepped into the rift. It felt real in a way that his dreams never had.

The hot, dry air made him cough heavily. Being from New Orleans, he was used to the heat...but not like this. The sun back home would bake you red if you weren't careful, but its heat didn't feel so oppressive. Henry felt like it was getting harder and harder to breathe.

He wandered around for a little while, coming across abandoned buildings. One of them had water bottles in them, and he was grateful for it, even if the water was hot. Henry spied a honeysuckle plant on one of the nearby groups of flowers, and he suddenly felt hopeless. Moving slowly towards the plant, Henry took one flower and drew out its sweet nectar. He and Louis had once spent a day gathering honeysuckles. "Tastes sweet, mon cher. But not as sweet as you." Henry had laughed and teased him for being sappy.

Tears sprung to his eyes, but he blinked them away. The nectar was so sweet that he closed his eyes to savor it a little. Yet, every time he did he could tell that the world was beginning to spin. Henry opened his eyes and saw a shadow out of the corner of his vision.

"Hello?" he called, desperate. If this was a dream, he'd like to wake up now. Henry followed the shadow to the empty cathedral, but there was nothing there. He stared helplessly at the ruined stained glass above him, the light beginning to fracture in his vision, and felt sick to his stomach. Henry crouched down to the floor on his hands and knees. He wanted to throw up, but he hadn't eaten anything recently.

"If anyone can hear me...why, I'd be posi-tute-ly delighted to hear another voice right now," he said to the empty air, coughing some more. Once again, there was no answer.

Notes: He's from the 1920s, so expect a lot of jazz age slang, as well as introspection about the realities of the time period: homophobia, racism, xenophobia, etc.

Also, would there be pianos in Noctium, by any chance?