Newbie
Group: Mercantile Elite
Posts: 5
Member No.: 46
Joined: 20-August 09
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Player Information
Name: Maddie
Age: 20
Gender: Female
Contact Information: AIM maddiehornet, but I am not on a lot
Character Profile
Name: Connor O’Flanaghan
Age: 23
Gender: Male
Country of Origin: Ireland
Occupation: Tutor
Avatar: Seth Green
Appearance: He is reasonably tall, not especially towering over others but a very decent height 5’11’’. Connor is rather thin and lanky with ribs that could be counted easily. This is a result of both poverty and just simply because he often forgets to eat. His frame is straight and long-limbed although he isn't awkward except at bad moments or when he is nervous. He has very large hands with long fingers that are permanently ink-stained.
Connor has a pointed face with a long, straight English nose but a dark red crop of Irish hair and eyebrows the same color. His hair is shoulder-length and tied back in a ponytail. He has very bright eyes, dark brown but catching a great deal of light and a simply enormous good-natured grin. His skin is very pale and it tends to burn in the sun. He is usually clean-shaven but sometimes forgets and develops a gingery shadow of stubble. Quite often he will have smears of purple-black iron gall ink on his face as well as his hands when he brushes his face and does not realize that he is leaving marks. He tends to chew the nibs of his pens too, and that makes the corners of his mouth are often smeared as well. His clothing and person often smell of camphor oil.
He has one good outfit that he takes very great care of, which is a plain dark grey coat and waistcoat, and trousers. He wears that on Sundays and if he is invited to a formal occasion. The rest of his clothing is very worn and ragged. He tries to darn his own socks and mend his own clothing but he is very, very bad at it. His stiches are wide, crooked and wandering, and he often chooses a color of thread that is completely inappropriate for mending the article in question. Like heavy white canvas thread to mend a rent in a dark brown coat, for instance. Or like brown yarn to darn white socks.
Connor is usually rapid in his speech though not to the point of being incomprehensible, with a light tenor voice that is amiable and pleasant. When he is nervous he talks even faster, so much that he begins to stumbling over his own tongue.
Personality: He is friendly and open with an optimistic view of the world and of most people. He assumes the best possible things of everyone equally unless he has direct evidence to have the contrary look of things.
He is a good-natured person and he dislikes hostility very much. If he is drawn into an argument he will try to defuse it the best way that he can and he is very easy to get along with usually. He is courteous and gentle with his wording and tries very hard never to offend anyone. Connor is also very forgiving and will let insult and injury to his person slide without getting upset. He will only take a more aggressive behavior when someone he cares for is insulted or hurt. Then he will fly angrily to their defense. If he cared enough about someone, a family member or close friend and the offense was great enough he could even be brought to fight over that person. Physically he is not very threatening. He has never been in a fight of any kind. Harming another human being is beyond his capabilities, not because he is too weak to do it but because it is just not in his heart. If he was dragged into one he would lose for certain.
It isn’t true that Connor wouldn’t hurt a fly though. He has a large collection of preserved arthropods which are a particular interest of his. But he can't bear to pin them and see them struggling and dying slowly. Instead he uses a drop or two of liquid camphor to kill them very quickly in a matter of two or three seconds. While he is familiar with Linnaean taxonomy and a great admirer of Linnaeus he is only very well-educated in entomology. Although he has some scattered knowledge of the other branches of taxonomy.
His personal philosophy matches Renaissance humanism. Finding practical truth and knowledge is much more important to him than a transcendental ideal. He has a strong sense of honor and morals and he lives by a personal code guided by the doctrine of his church. Like his mother he is an Anglican although his religious devotion suffers in comparison to his scientific dedication. Everything suffers next to that actually. He is just not very interested in art or music, or literature, or law, or theology or anything much other than the way the world ticks. He believes that science could fascinate everyone and that it should too, so he is an equal opportunity teacher to anyone who wants to learn.
He is a natural talent of mathematics and he is intrigued by the higher branches especially the relatively recent field of differential calculus. Applied mathematics however, is of more practical interest to him and he is fluent in both chemistry and physics as far as they are understood at the time. Whatever he turns his perceptions to he takes seriously. He is not a dilettante and is he is more than conversant in the branches of science with which he works. His knowledge is actually profound and he sticks carefully to the scientific method. But that means that he is pretty uneducated and stupid in other areas of knowledge, like practical common sense.
Walking into the apartment that Connor rents is not an exercise for the faint of heart or a squeamish person. He owns such curious instruments as the very best microscope model and he builds and collects equipment for experimentation both physical and chemical. His room is filled with a very strange arrangements of springs, air-pumps, flasks, distilling devices and a very large and sagging shelf of books including Systema Naturae, The Sceptical Chymist or Chymico-Physical Doubts & Paradoxes, Micrographia, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, La Géométrie, Discours de la méthode, De humani corporis fabrica and other major works. His arthropod collection is also displayed each preserved neatly and pinned to white boards. He refuses to permit anyone in to clean and he does so rarely himself. Although he keeps everything religiously organised there is dust over everything except for any sensitive equipment that will be harmed by such dust and for his arthropods which are also kept very neatly.
Connor is perpetually poor because he is given only a very small allowance by his father every year supplemented by the wages the Brintons pay him for his tutoring. Worse he spends every extra penny of his on materials for experimentation. He has no head for saving and there is a permanent hole in his pocket as a result. He is very accepting of his own lot however, and he doesn’t complain about it very much except in good humor. He tends to find the bright side to everything or if there is nothing good about a situation he at least avoids to worrying about or mentioning the bad.
He is also quite absent-minded, forgetting as often as not that he has to eat or to comb his hair and failing to notice the passage of time when he is interested by something. Connor has difficulty keeping appointments because of this and requires someone else’s help in remembering when he needs to be someplace. He will often fall asleep over his books studying late into the night and so he has a great expenditure in smelly tallow candles as well.
Connor is fluent in written and conversational French, Spanish, Latin and Greek because most scientific literature is written in those languages. He has a smattering of Irish Gaelic as well though not much. He is a decent artist who pays close attention to detail although he only ever makes sketches of arthropods.
Strengths: Connor is quite intelligent and he is very highly educated. He is multilingual and French can probably be of especial use in the Caribbean. He is charismatic and likable by most people although his negative characteristics can probably be very annoying. He is the son of a gentleman although an Irish one, so he is a respectable member of society.
Weaknesses: He is not physically strong and he has never even fired a gun. Guns may be the great equalizer but in Connor’s hands one wouldn’t be much help. He is absent-minded often in the extreme. When started on a subject he is interested in he can talk his audience’s ears off if they do not stop him. He may often be viewed as a little strange or even weird. He is a total lightweight with no head for alcohol, one beer would get him drunk. Finally he is very poor at the moment with no likelihood of escaping that status in the near future.
History: Connor’s story has to start with his parents’ marriage really. Devlin O’Flanaghan was a member of the Irish landed gentry in Ulster, a Catholic who converted to be Anglican in order to hold land and leave it to his heirs. Although Devlin was a strong Irish nationalist personal interest won out over pride and he gave up his religion. Devlin had been in love with an Irish lass named Sinead, but when he changed his church she was not willing to marry him and in a fit of temper he proposed to the very first woman who caught his eye after she had rejected him. That was Mary Tilney an Englishwoman. Devlin was rather handsome and could be charming when he wanted to be and she fell in love with him very quickly and accepted him.
For the rest of his life Devlin struggled with the idea that he was a traitor to his church and to his countrymen. Although he was kind to his wife he never really loved her and his attentions to her were out of duty not anything else. He began to drink hard, getting worse as time went on. She found solace in the four children they had together, first twin sons named Donovan and Seamus, and then a daughter Elaine and finally Connor in quick succession. Mary was a devoted and compassionate mother and was definitely the major person in Connor’s upbringing. His father Devlin was a distant figure and although he was never cruel to his children he never paid them much attention either. In a moral sense Mary was the biggest influence in shaping his mind as well as in giving him an all encompassing curiosity about the world that could never be satisfied.
Connor and his siblings were very close, similar in more than just age but age had a lot to do with it. The difference between the eldest twins and Connor was only two years. They went through a lot of scrapes together. Elaine his older sister, was quite a tomboy and there was no particular distinction between brothers and sister until they all grew a little older and Donovan and Seamus were sent off together to Eton for an education. Elaine was eleven now and their mother Mary took her in hand and she restrained her from the boyish activities she had previously taken part in. Elaine was to be a lady. In response to Mary’s care Elaine gradually grew to be more and more of a proper young woman. Although she and her brother always loved each other they had little in common anymore.
With Donovan and Seamus gone and Elaine now in training to be an accomplished little ornament Connor was left by his lonesome often enough. He no longer had a close playmate. He began reading books, mostly adventure-novels and he disappeared for hours at a time into a fantasy world until Mary noticed his new hobby and forbade him to read any more novels. She thought they were trashy and inappropriate for a growing mind. Since he knew that when he was twelve he would go to Eton where Donovan and Seamus were studying, that became the main focus of his hopes.
He was sent when he was old enough but Eton was rigorous and he found Donovan and Seamus (and his ownself) too busy to have the same kind of life they had before. His brothers did not have much time for him anymore and his idea of returning to the childhood idyll was squished. Instead he found himself pushed into books and forced to study intensively the difficult curriculum. Eton did not suit him very well at first because the education involved a lot of dry literature reading and theology and other things that didn't really interest him. But he applied himself because he was driven by his sense of duty. And eventually he began to find a new application for his intense curiosity once he started learning more about mathematics and sciences. After the first two years or so of the classical education he received at Eton he began to truly throw himself into it.
His elder brothers after completing their Eton education, were happy enough to return home. Connor, when his time came at seventeen wasn’t ready to do that. He felt there was far more to know and giving up now to go and run about like any young rip would be a failure. He knew there was much more to be discovered and also knew that he could only reach it by attending a university. Connor wrote to his father and requested for himself to be sent to Oxford to study further. Devlin O’Flanaghan replied that he would send him but he would only give him a very small stipend to live on. At Eton Connor’s room and board were paid for. At Oxford he would have to shift for himself.
He found a tiny garret to rent and for the most part he ate knowledge instead of food for his subsistence during the next few years of his life at Oxford. Even though his living conditions were absolutely miserable however, and a desperately poor student had almost no friends, Connor was transcendentally happy during this time. He had an opportunity to be part of one of the finest institutes of higher learning in the world and to learn from some of the greatest names in science of the day. He corresponded with distinguished lecturers from Cambridge, Edinburgh, Gottingen and other universities. He had few friends but he was absorbed enough in his studies that it did not matter very much to him. The curiosity he had held since he was a small boy turned into a passion as strong as any physical love.
When he returned home from Oxford four years later he found the family situation very changed. He received very little correspondence from anyone. It came as a shock to him then to find that Seamus had been thrown out of the family in disgrace after an unfortunate affair with a young woman in the neighborhood. That his sister married an English gentleman named James Whitmore, and was no longer at home but instead she lived in Kent far away in England. Finally his father had grown very sickly and old beyond his years, and extremely ill-tempered which was why Seamus had been cast out. His mother Mary was nervous to a degree to match Devlin’s temper. Donovan kept to himself, welcoming his little brother back with a reserve that shocked Connor.
He had always looked forwards to seeing his family again with warm visions of a happy little circle, but there was very little at home to hold him. Before long he left to travel. Connor was uncertain of where he would go. Donovan was the heir or the estate since Seamus was disinherited. Before this Connor never really realized he should finding himself a career. But after this visit home he understood things were changing and he couldn’t go on living just on an allowance or staying at home. It was going to be too hot to hold anyone soon.
The only thing that he could think of was to go to work as a tutor, but in a place like Ulster there was nobody that would hire him. He thought about going to Kent to be near his sister, but eventually Connor decided to try to start out in London, which was the greatest city in the world and held a lot of hope for him. Connor arrived in London almost totally penniless and he was unable to get credit. Fortunately he still had the appearance of a gentleman and he was able to successfully land himself a position as tutor to the young daughters of the Allens, a middle-class family with pretensions to higher things.
He did not receive high wages however, and the Allens didn't give him lodging and board either so he was barely able to keep food on his plate and a roof over his head. As soon as he was able he sent word to his father asking for relief, but when the response came it was much less than what he had hoped for. Devlin sent him a small amount and he promised to send more regularly but it was not much even when it was put together with his wages.
After a few months had passed however, he found himself in even more dire straits again because the Allen family was leaving London and they didn’t want to take the whole household with them. He was forced to seek a new position but it was easier this time as he had an excellent letter of reference from Mr Allen.
Connor applied to various families but finally and quite recently found a good position hired by Richard Brinton. It offered a room in the Brintons' town house, and laundry, and three square meals a day, and best of all he got full access to the Brintons' library. He was supposed to instruct Mr Brinton’s two daughters in French, Latin, and Greek, and he was supposed to give his young son the foundation of a classical education in everything appropriate for a boy of a good standing. He hasn't started giving the Brinton children their lessons yet but he looks forward to it with both a mixture of optimism and apprehension.
Sample RP: Connor had been given a holiday today from his tutoring. Mr. Brinton wanted Benjamin with him that day in order to show his son around his office and begin introducing him to the business he would inherit some day. And Mrs. Brinton had decided that both Catherine and Abigail deserved a break from their studies along with Benjamin. So Connor had a free day off. He wasn't sure he was as happy about the holiday as Mrs. Brinton probably expected him to be since Connor actually liked his work.
But it did give him a chance to go out during market hours and see what was for sale in the different shops. In the early morning when he took his walks usually the vendors of the kinds of things he was interested in weren't open. But now he could go to the booksellers, and the apothecary's, and other specialty stores and see what they had to offer him. And since the Brintons' salary they paid him was a lot better than he made before he actually had a little money stored up to spend. When he first went out he planned to order himself some new clothes at the tailors since he really, really needed them.
But Connor had quickly forgot that plan and he already bought a book which he was carrying in a carefully wrapped package under his arm. It was the second volume of Carolus Linnaeus's Species Plantarum, before now Connor only had the first volume. Buying it had taken up most of his money which he had realized only after he bought it. It didn't leave him enough to order new clothes unless he got them on credit. He would probably try to get them on credit but a tailor might not be willing to give him credit. Which needless to say wouldn't be good for the state of Connor's appearance which was already shabby. Still he was quite happy with his book.
He was walking through the crowd with a quick pace planning to head to the watch makers next. His watch was running slow and he needed it working correctly if he was going to use it to measure time accurately. For Connor accuracy and precision were both very important. But as he was passing through the street a delicious smell came through the air to his nose causing his stomach to rumble loudly and remind him that he hadn't eaten that day. He slowed and stopped and looked around him. A bakery to his left met his eyes and he put his hand into his coat pocket, feeling the coins he had left in there and thinking about it.
When his stomach rumbled again it took control of his thoughts and he decided that he was going to get something to eat before he fell over. He headed towards the door and pulled it open and the shop bell tinkled, but just as he set foot inside the shop he saw that he was headed on a collision course with another customer, a rather short and small man who was about to leave. Connor automatically stopped and stepped aside to get out of the other man's way. But as it turned out he was exactly mirroring Hales' movements. They both had stepped aside at the same time and in the same direction so they were still facing each other. They even both had their hands up to tip their hats to each other.
It struck him as rather funny and he had to grin as he tipped his hat to the man. "Afternoon" the other fellow had said to him as they first moved and Connor answered back to him now "Good afternoon! I'm really very sorry," and began to step to the side again to move out of Hales' way...
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Connor O'Flanaghan
