Paul Wyndham

Name: Paul Vincent Wyndham 

Nicknames: He doesn't particularly have any, and the only one he really accepts is "Wyndham". 

Age: 23

Birthday: 7 December 


Alignment: Chaotic Evil

Fav. Food: Salads, of all kinds but especially with ginger dressing; cucumbers; tuna salad wraps. He likes cold foods. 

Hated Food: He does not like scallions, nor does he like curry. Nor does he like carrots, and he will pick them out of his salads if he must.  

Hobbies: 
Piano-- Paul is a pianist. He loves the piano, and has since his mother stuck him on lessons when he was eight. Every year, he helped out his school with the musical; he also played in the school orchestra from middle school on up. While he doesn't compose his own works, he likes to download music from the internet that appeals. He has the entire piano score of Atonement memorized. His favorite music to play is more modern than classical; Mozart and Chopin hold no fascination for him. He'd sooner spend his time trying to figure out how to play Vanessa Carlton songs than practicing Chopsticks. 

Tai Chi-- This is a hobby he picked up when he was young, after watching his father meditate most mornings. He believes it keeps him centered, focused, and able to handle whatever comes along; what it actually does is gives him an hour or two every day where he can sort out his thoughts on most everything. If he's disturbed, or doesn't get to do his hour of meditation, he is very unhappy and will likely be off-balance (and very unhappy with the person who interrupted him!) for the rest of the day. He feels he absolutely needs this time to function, and it creates a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy; he thinks he'll be off-balance and unhappy if he misses tai chi, so he is. 

Journal-keeping/Scrapbooking-- Journal-keeping, a hobby that Paul adores. Adores, adores, adores: he almost has a compulsion to keep records of what he's been doing. At home there are cardboard boxes full of journals and journals and journals and journals. He glues in pictures, interesting leaves he finds, just about everything he can keep to have perfect memories of everything that happens. He's pretty good at this, and in fact keeps three books ongoing at a time--one for secrets, one for class notes, and one for public consumption. 

Virtues: 
Considerate-- If something bothers you, Paul drops it. It doesn't matter what it is he's doing or talking about that bothers you, he will stop talking about it or doing it as long as he's around you. Does his stance on healthcare offend you? He will never bring it up again. This trait also leads to a very polite, well-spoken young man, who is quite pleased to hold open doors and pull out chairs for all of his acquaintances, not just the girls. He tries his best to help without making it seem like he thinks you're incompetent, thinking quite seriously about how to allow you to save face. Uncomfortable subjects are to be broached in whispers, privately, or not at all. Unfortunately, sometimes this goes too far, and he won't discuss something that really bothers him because he's worried he will offend. 

Pensive-- Paul thinks about things. He thinks about them a lot. He mulls them over, writes down his thoughts in his journal, takes a break to write in a different journal or play some piano, and then he goes back and thinks about things some more. Eventually, he might even draw a conclusion. Or, if you draw a conclusion first, he will take this conclusion and turn that over a few times in his head too. And once one issue is resolved, he will think about something else. This means that he makes good decisions, usually; he gets all the information, thinks about the pros and cons, and then he decides. It's not the fastest way to go about things, and can really mess up his long-term decision making, but he usually manages to think up a good solution to most every problem, given enough time. 

Humble-- Paul is a great follower. And this is because he knows exactly what he did right and exactly what he did wrong, and he will do his best to repair that for next time. He knows this sort of thing because he is pensive, and tends to review his actions over and over and over. In addition, this means in a team situation he doesn't try to countermand orders; he follows them, helping out with the other members where he can. This doesn't mean that he's a bad leader. He's pretty good at it, as long as he's got sufficient direction--even the vaguest idea of what he's supposed to achieve ("Protect this", "Destroy that", "Get me this" is sufficient) and he'll put his not-inconsiderable intelligence to work.

Flaws: 
Quiet-- and how. He doesn't talk when he's stressed. He doesn't talk when he's afraid. His thoughts are his own, and sometimes--a lot of the time--okay pretty much all the time--he'll tell you about his surface thoughts but not what he's really thinking. He might be considering dinner superficially, but he might truly be thinking about how he dropped important documents in a puddle and now he's screwed next time he speaks to his superior. And it's really, really hard to tell when he's considering how bad he is gonna hate himself tomorrow, precisely because he spends so much time being pensive and mulling things over. 

Pensive-- As long as he has time, he'll make a good decision. But what about when he doesn't have time? What about when he has to make a lot of decisions in a very short about of time? Paul tends to panic and make the absolute worst choice, the kind of choice that comes from his heart rather than his head, if he can manage to make a choice at all. This isn't saying if you've planned to go out to lunch at a certain restaurant and you change your mind, he'll freak, because he won't. If you hand him three different , the deadline's next week, and he can only apply to one, he will agonize over the decision until the day before the deadline where he'll pick the cheapest one or the one with the highest acceptance rate and send it in, only to remember that his transcript isn't with it and he's fucked anyway. 

In battle, this can really suck. As long as things are going to plan, he'll do exactly what he's supposed to do. But if something goes wrong, if there's an element unaccounted for, he goes straight for the objective and then gets straight out. 

Resentful-- Paul has gone his entire life being told what to do, and he's done what he's been told, and he's done it with a smile. He's studying to be a doctor because his parents wanted him to. He plays piano because his parents wanted him to. He is at Sovereign Heights because his parents wanted him to be at Sovereign Heights, and you know what? He doesn't see how his life is ever going to improve from answering orders to jump with 'how high?' Sure, he's still just a cog in the machine with the Negaverse, but ripping starseeds out of people's chests makes him feel good. It's something he decides to do, and he does it when he wants to do it. He picks his victims. He doesn't kill for the control over others, but for the feeling of control over himself. 

He's not crazy; he's not sociopathic or psychopathic. He just relishes his chance to do something just because he wants to. 


Writing Sample:
He was six years old and Father was teaching him how to keep the madness in. 

“Like this,” he said, holding Paul’s hand to his shoulder. “Slowly,” he said, standing away to let Paul do it himself. And, slowly, his hand a glacier over the mountains of his bicep, he ran his palm along the curves of his arm, to the dip of his wrist and over the thumbs. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, a counterbalance, bending the knee just so, foot turned out to such an angle. From here, he could lash out--a forward snap kick to break the delicate bones of the wrist, a feint to be re-chambered, to distract from a punch or open-handed slap. He did not lash out, he did not strike; he flattened his hands, drew them before him like he was carving a hemisphere of the world. 

“Like that,” said Father, “that will keep the madness in.” 

He was eight years old and Mother was teaching him how to keep the madness in. 

“Hold still,” she said, sitting Paul on a flat black bench. “Faster,” she said, standing away to let Paul do it himself. Before him was a giant’s skeleton, the ivory ribs linked together with wire. Cancer boiled up inside it in pairs of three, and he touched his fingers to the bone to hear the chime. His madness made the blackness boil higher, but it stayed inside the ribs of the monstrous skeleton. The bone grew brittle, though, and broke, falling to powder under his touch, coating the blackness, keeping it down, keeping it small, fizzing it into nothing. A reverse chemical reaction. 

“Like that,” said Mother, “That will keep the madness in.” 

He was twelve years old and his parents were teaching him how to keep the madness in. 

“Study this,” they said, setting a book before him. “Harder,” they said, standing away to let Paul do it himself. And he looked, reading about the flow of blood cells through the arteries, veins, and capillaries. He studied the firing of neurons, the howling of the madness ringing in his ears. He learned the enzymes that bound and rebound his genes, that gave his madness a human shape, a form that let him stand among others, he learned the bare convoluted fissures of his brain: Temporal lobe, amygdala, cerebellum, the connections between logic and life. The table before him was bare and devoid of meaning, the words were the bone of his skull. He was made of words, crawling with them as ants; one good rain and he would be nothing but madness. 

“Like that,” said his parents, “that will keep the madness in.” 

He was sixteen years old and it was up to him to learn how to keep the madness in. 

His hands around Father’s throat eased nothing. The man gasped and choked, fingernails ripping into the skin of Paul’s wrists, carving out pleas (please) along veins and capillaries and the hemisphere of the world could not stop him, the bones did not free Father’s neck, the words did not hold him back until he chose to draw his hands away. And there, sketched over the arteries, over the windpipe, just under the Adam’s apple, was a butterfly in crimson red that took wing and flew over Paul’s shoulder. 

He was seventeen years old and it was up to him to learn how to keep the madness in. 

He turned to watch the butterfly become a leaf and flutter to the ground; with calm deliberation, he stepped on it, yielding a quiet crunch. His mother whimpered as he shifted his weight to his toes and leaned, ancillary cracks like Arctic ice, breaking under heat, under pressure--and his mother shattered along fault lines, like brittle glass, her peach-toned skin peeling off like so much paper. It was easy, under his nails, like an orange; he had to be careful not to reach too deep, but in the end, it all came away, leaving bare bone and bubbling black. His father’s eyes dripped with Paul’s madness. 

“That is how you keep the madness in,” he said. “Like that.” 

He was eighteen years old and it was up to him to learn how to keep the madness in. 

He cracked his mother’s sternum to pull out a gorgeously brilliant stone; from inside his father’s throat he pulled its twin. And, to keep the madness in, he ground them to stone with his own, their dark triplet, and released the opalescent powders to the wind. 

The madness was not contained, it would not go away. It was leaking from his nose, a thick black trail following the thin blue vein no one quite ever notices from the corner of his lips down along his jaw. His fingers were covered in it. His hair trailed in it. It fell from his eyes and turned to obsidian beads that clinked against the shards of his mother’s beautiful bones. 

Could beauty grow from those severed limbs? Paul hit one knee, hard, clutching his hands to his head with desperation aforethought. Could the madness give birth to ivory keys, lovely but empty of meaning? The world seemed to be dissolving, falling to pieces around him, into the frosted trees of piano keys he imagined, lilies taking their sustenance in the places where life still flowed. 

Not so bad, he thought, to let the madness free, if in place of him and his graceless body there would be a white willow, or perhaps a brilliant, blood-drunk Martagon lily.