The usual, comments will be unscreened for conversational purposes.

OOC Information:

Name: Reg

Are you over 15? Yes

Contact: Regasssa on AIM, Plurk and @ hotmail dot com


IC Information:

Name: Patrick Jane (Reincarnation: Terry James)

Canon and medium: The Mentalist (Live Action TV)

Age: 45

Preincarnation Species: Human

Preincarnation Appearance: Simon Baker Like this and Like this
Basically yellow blonde, curly hair, 5'10", green eyes. Sophisticated and animated.

Any differences: Simon Baker Like this and Like this
Looser and less sophisticated than Jane, Terry worries less about his appearance. He's tanned and pleasant, smiles often, and his style is everything multicultural but with a Western twist.

Preincarnated History: http://thementalist.wikia.com/wiki/Season_1, http://thementalist.wikia.com/wiki/Season_2, http://thementalist.wikia.com/wiki/Season_3, http://thementalist.wikia.com/wiki/Season_4, http://thementalist.wikia.com/wiki/Season_5, http://thementalist.wikia.com/wiki/Season_6

Patrick is being drawn from the end of the Season 6 episode My Blue Heaven, which ascribes that two years after Jane murdered Red John, he is in exile in South America. The first five and a half seasons cover the CBI's investigation of Red John, and this is the first episode since the pilot to not have a word linked to the color red in the title.

The Mentalist is a serial criminal investigation series, so for the most part the episodes are all individual stories irrelavent to the major arcs, rather than a continuing story. This is especially true for the character of Patrick Jane, who experiences very little evolution: his is the story of a man, after all, who has been drifting along in a fugue ever since the loss of his wife and daughter to a serial killer five years previously. He thought his life was one thing, and then that happiness evaporated, leaving him only with pain. Like the whaler captain in the story of Moby Dick, Jane becomes devoted to finding the man who killed his wife and daughter, such that it almost destroys him (in fact, at several points Red John steps in to see that Jane is saved from situations that might stop him from investigating further, simply because he enjoys the game.) Jane commits a number of crimes, including straight up murder, in his quest to get Red John for himself; it isn't enough that he's brought to justice, it has to be by his own hand.

"... the first thing that anyone sees is the face on the wall. You see the face first, and you know. You know what's happened and you feel dread. Then, and only then, do you see the body of the victim. Always in that order."'

The catalyst was a television performance where Jane made 'psychic' statements about Red John. When we meet Jane, he has taken to sleeping under that face, and sniffing at any information about Red John that comes along. In a flashback episode, he is shown employing his own brand of manipulative skill to ensure that he ends up allowed to assist the CBI (California Bureau of Investigation) team that has been assigned the Red John case, allowing him access to records and crime scenes in return for his unique investigative skill. Incidentally, further flashback episodes reflect briefly on Jane's life as a Carnie; he grew up without a formal education, and used his skill at cold reading and illusion to make a life for himself, later formally taking up the title 'psychic' and appearing on television as well as fleecing ever richer people (usually women) out of money.

The Wiki page here further elaborates on the Red John case, and in this link, specifically on the sequence of events leading up to Red John's death. After Red John's criminal organisation is revealed - it goes all the way to the top of the CBI, and involves FBI agents also - and after the rest of the potential suspects are killed in an effort to fake his own death, Patrick Jane leads him to a showdown at the church, the churchyard in which his wife and daughter are buried. Red John means to kill him, but Patrick frightens him with a pigeon, and shoots him in the leg. Wounded, Red John flees; Jane pursues him, and catching him strangles him there in the churchyard. He escapes, leaving the body there.

Two years later, Jane is a different man. He's left behind the murders of his family, though he still hasn't removed his marriage band. He has a routine, and his life is one of sleepy repetition; he has no television or radio, only tea, and seems to have no interest in the world outside of his South American island. He writes a letter to Lisbon each week, takes it to the post office and speaks briefly with the two women who chat together there. His spanish is terrible, but he flirts with them. He does a coin trick for some boys on the street. He heads to a beachside dive, where he pats a friendly dog, says hello to an English man who apparently doesn't talk, then speaks briefly in spanish with the owner. He asks for tea, and the owner is disgusted that he doesn't want coffee. It's a far cry from his life in California.

Then one day everything changes. He speaks to a woman in the bar, who is reading an english novel, asking to have the book when she's finished as he doesn't get much to read. They flirt, and Patrick wins her over. A bellboy at the island's only tourist hotel calls him to tell him that a group of English agents have shown up. He leaves, the woman catches up to him on the beach and they arrange a date later that night. Jane visits the agent and is given an ultimatum; 24 hours to make a decision, to return to his life and assist the FBI, or to be indicted and repatriated with a cloth bag on his head, to face trial for murder. He goes on his date, and is assaulted on the way home. The woman cares for him, and they wake to a new morning - she's leaving, and it's bittersweet.

Jane goes off on his routine. This time when he reaches the bar he isn't greeted by the dog. He finds the owner burying the animal in the yard; it had been killed by a drug smuggler over a disagreement with the owner. All is not well in his corner of paradise, it seems. The woman makes one last visit, giving Jane her number. He calls the bellboy and works out where the smuggler is going to do his deal, then he writes on the napkin she'd written his number on. He lays his plans carefully. He calls the agent and arranges a meeting in one of the hotel rooms. He visits the post office for photocopies, kisses one of the ladies on the cheek, and heads off for the hotel. By clever tricks, Jane has made the FBI agents bust in on the smugglers, arriving moments later with the pretense that he had nothing to do with it, and his list of photocopied terms--which he makes the agent sign.

Reincarnated History: Terry James was born Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. The great grandson of one of the state's most famous outlaws turned Sheriff, and christened as his namesake, he was raised to a life nested in a certain degree of romance. He grew up in the near untouched and still savage New Mexico landscape, surrounded by mountains, the Elephant Butte reservoir and the magnificent Rio Grande river, and rode off into the sunsets painted by his grandfather's stories of the Wild West every night.

The James family owned one of the town's smallest hot springs; it had once been owned by their great grandmother's family, until she married then Sheriff Terry James. During the fifties, and after their retirement from public life, the town was renamed Truth or Consequences after the radio show of the same name, from its original name Hot Springs. Their first born son, Terry's grandfather, was 41 at the time, and thoroughly enjoyed telling his grandson stories about that, as well.

Born in 1969, the year of the moon landing, James Terry found immense pleasure in the stories coming out of the rest of New Mexico at the time, of aliens and far away worlds. As well as having a passion for Wild West stories, thanks to his heritage, he began to find immense pleasure in science fiction, which only grew as the years passed. He could be frequently found behind the reservation desk of the family spa reading a Fantastic Voyage or a Strange Tale. Still, that was the young James Terry's life: he grew up in a sleepy town full expecting to run the family business when he was older, and that was that. His childhood was unexciting. He attended high school, wrote for the school paper, spent much of his youth reading, composing poetry or riding his horses (Zip, Sundance, Kit and Apache, all named after famous outlaws. Each horse bought in its later years died before the purchase of the next, and all were much loved pets, apart from Sundance who had a vicious temper, and kicked when given even the slightest opportunity.)

All was well in the James household until Terry James was ten. It was 1979, the family business was failing, and the town was buying up hot springs, attempting to reduce the town's energy demands by harnessing the geothermal heat beneath it. Retaining their family homestead, the James' sold their rundown spa and its water rights back to the town.

The family's struggles began all the more difficult. At eighteen, Terry elected not to go to college and instead began working for a tourist hotel in Elephant Butte five miles away. By the time he was twenty he knew how to sail, swim, fish, and play golf, and began to take on more work with the public themselves, assisting in hiking, water skiing, trail riding and more. He found that he was quite good at telling stories, and three years of hard graft made him the hotel's activity manager. He learned to play the guitar, to sing, and made more money playing at wedding parties and dances. Terry's efforts helped to keep his family home for his family, but he wasn't happy. It was a small town, and Terry's occasional affair with the clientel never led to anything substantial. He began to write escapist stories; stories where aliens and the Wild West merged, stories about government conspiracy and world changing secrets.

At 32, a chance meeting resulted in two wonderful things happening for Terry. Head bridesmaid at the wedding he was singing at, Julianna was an editor, reading one of his stories on a whim after a discussion with Terry that went on late into the night. Firstly, it would result in one of his short stories being published, but secondly Julianna became Terry's wife, a dazzling and short lived affair that gave him as much pleasure as grief. They were married for three years, during which Terry James made it to the top of the New York Times Bestsellers list twice, and in which he was forced to move to Manhatten, a place that didn't agree with him remotely. She divorced him for everything he had when, after a discussion about having children went south, she told him outright that she'd never intended to settle down with him, and children were out of the question. Terry didn't fight her lawyers, but to ensure that no further money he made would have to be divided between them, signed what he had to sign, and went back to New Mexico to write.

Less than a year later his parents died in suspicious circumstances, veering off the road and crashing full speed into a large rock--the suspicious circumstances? They made no effort to brake. Terry inherited their home, fortunately too late for his ex-wife to make any claim on it, but after another year of living in the home found that he couldn't stand to be surrounded by the ghosts and reminders of his absent parents. He chose to make a new start, and on the proceeds of his new book began an eight year pilgrimage that would lead him eventually to Locke City. Terry lived in Bombay, Honolulu, Budapest, Roswell, Jakarta, Washington DC, Jamestown, Las Vegas, Moscow, Detroit, Wellington, Anchorage, London, Salem, Rio de Janeiro, and finally St Louis, chasing new flavors of life and the occasional extra-terrestrial exploit; life was experience, though he stayed no longer than six months in any one place, and spent six months in the USA for every six months abroad.

In any case, his adventures have brought him to Locke City, looking for said extraterrestrial activity, ready to soak in whatever experiences come his way, and to write about them. Tanned and a little bit famous, Terry has had his spots on nationwide morning television, and anyone familiar with science fiction may have heard of his work. A list of his story titles follows: SS is for short story LS is for a novel. I'll write up brief novel summaries if they're needed as discussion points.

Terry never did settle down again. One failed marriage was more than enough for him, despite his longing to have children.

'91 SS - Chihuahua Cove
'92 SS - What I Found Beneath a Boulder
'92 LS - Under the Winter Lights
'92 SS - Sundancer
'93 LS - Roadtrip to Andromeda
'94 LS - The Starlight Key - The Starlight Key Trilogy
'95 LS - The Supernova Box - The Starlight Key Trilogy
'96 LS - The Galactic Lock - The Starlight Key Trilogy
'98 LS - Agent Keen, Shrouded in Secrecy
'99 LS - Under the Third Moon of Triga
'00 LS - Don't Ever Breathe In
'02 LS - Agent Keen, The Wild West Showdown
'03 SS compilation - Agent Keen, The Years Between: 10 short stories covering the many adventures of Agent Michael Keen.
'05 LS - Look Ma, An Alien!
'07 LS - Agent Keen, The Bombay Mystery
'08 LS - Turn Left at Jupiter
'08 SS compilation - Agent Keen, The Years Within: 10 short stories covering the many adventures of Agent Keen during his time as a Man in Black.
'09 LS - Spacedust Saloon
'10 LS - If It Phones Home, Kill It
'11 LS - The Interstellar Plague
'12 LS - Quarantine: Earth - Sequel to The Interstellar Plague
'13 SS compilation - Agent Keen - The Years Beyond: 10 short stories covering the many adventures of Agent Keen after his abduction to Pegasus.

First Echo: Canon reoccurance/technically also an item: Terry is visiting the park in Locke City. Newly arrived, carrying nothing but his pack, he sits and writes notes for his new book based on the characters of the people he sees around him. A young girl approaches him, asks him what he's doing, and introduces herself as Charlotte. She asks him if he knows how to make paper airplanes, and Terry folds his sheet of notes into a paper plane. When he throws it, she runs away after it, and Terry is left with the girl's name ringing in his ears, poignantly familiar. With the name Charlotte comes a rush of intense sadness, which will reccur whenever he hears the name.

Preincarnation Personality:
Patrick Jane was born to a carnie background, and raised by his father, a callow and opportunistic man who had learned to use the tricks of the trade to make money. Surrounded by the weird and wonderful, Patrick applied himself to his learning, learning how to act and lie, how to cold read visitors, observing them and listening to them for clues about their lives and relationships--and therefore ways to make his stage show interesting. Patrick learned magic tricks, palm reading and hypnosis from his fellow carnies, among other things, and he learned charisma and schmoozing from his father.

Despite this, and the fact that he never attended school or college, Patrick isn't classless or uneducated. In fact, he gives the appearance of being much higher class than he is. His accent and choice of words is fluent and varied, his knowledge of art, music, food and more is enormous, his tastes varied. He is immensely intelligent, diversely talented, and aided by his photographic memory and his memory palace. He once remarks, after helping a mob boss improve his golf game, that he never knew that golf was so easy. He picks up new things very easily.

He was never shy: Patrick was born to take the spotlight, and he took to it like a fish to water. He could win over even the most suspicious of skeptics, after all for most of his life he was selling the idea that psychics were real. He has the "gift of the gab", the ability to talk himself out of a corner, talk people into doing or admitting things they would never do or admit. Patrick is a showman, and it goes into everything he does, even the way that he sits in a chair, and he always has to be the cleverest person in the room. If it gets an interesting reaction out of people, he will withhold information, use it to make a wager he can't possibly lose, or use it to make some big exciting reveal. it's all about the prestige, the big reveal.

Patrick is an enormous character. Willful and cocky, Red John calls him arrogant. Hes used to getting his own way, and nobody is off limits: the FBI, mob bosses, other psychics. He likes to make the people who think they have the most power look the most foolish, just to teach them some humility, but he has no interest in the same being done to him. In fact, teaching other people lessons, or catching them in lies or smaller crimes is one of his particular skills and something he enjoys immensely, not least because if he does he can usually use them as a part of his plan to catch whichever killer they're after that week.

He's manipulative, and he can ricochet between genuinely caring and unexectedly callous, even cruel. Jane can be sensitive when it serves his purpose, but he has no difficulty in hurting other people's feelings, even those who are very close to him. The benefit of this is that he also doesn't get hurt emotionally either, but it comes at a cost when he gets people's backs up, or accuses them of the murder of their loved ones just to see how they feel about it. He's rude, sometimes even openly insulting and doesn't hesitate to say what he thinks out loud.

Patrick can be immensely secretive, and has an iron will, able to keep said secrets for as long as it takes. When he begins to construct his list of Red John suspects, he locks himself into his studio apartment in Sacramento, and puts a trap into the catch of the door so that if someone enters his apartment he knows about it. Patrick is naturally suspicious, though this is a more recent occurance. He was unsuspecting of the danger to his family or life when he spoke about Red John on television--had he been as suspicious then as he later was, as cautious, he wouldn't have considered it an acceptable risk.

And speaking of Red John: Patrick is massively driven by his obsession with the case, with tracking down and killing the man who killed his wife and daughter. He is completely inflexible in this plan: revenge will be his, and his alone. This inflexibility gets him into trouble a lot, as per aforementioned 'getting things his own way'. Dedication shows in other ways: his loyalty isn't just to his case, Jane is fiercely loyal to his friends in the CBI, to Hightower, and in particular to Teresa Lisbon.

In his pursuit of Red John, Patrick bends the rules and flaunts the law with abandon. His end desire is to commit murder, and bending the law to get to that point isn't out of the question. He conceals and fabricates evidence, trespasses on crime scenes, and even at one point frames a suspect he knows isn't Red John as the killer in order to facilitate his own pursuit. He evades authority, has no preestablished respect for anyone, even if they wear a badge, and believes that none of the rules apply to him. Because of his loss, Patrick understands the need to kill for revenge, and has his own moral code that he applies things to, for instance when he helps Rigsby to legally shoot dead in the line of duty the man who killed his father.

Physically his personality is one of calm control and focus. Jane always wears a smile, and can be found often with a cup of tea in his hand, which seems to make it easier for him to think. He's been known to go into the kitchen of houses where a murder has occured, or the homes of suspects or witnesses, and make himself a cup of tea without asking; he can cold read a kitchen to work out where the mugs and tea are kept as surely as he can pick apart an individual's past by looking at them. He also thinks well on his back, and had a thinking couch in CBI headquarters, one which was so worn out that he had it replaced with a new one. Speaking of, Patrick cares very little for money--it's a means to an end to him, and he's found that it can make people do very extreme things. The desire for money has unlocked a lot of cases, not to mention been a good way of bringing a little fun into the office.

Patrick enjoys having fun, is an impossible tease, has a good sense of humor, and he's very naughty. He likes to play games, even with solving cases, and enjoys playing the set up for his cat and mouse traps. And sometimes they're dangerous, and guns get involved. Patrick is fearless, perhaps foolishly so, and while he doesn't want to die he sometimes seems to have very little respect for his own life. He has very little to live for.

Any differences:
Terry and Patrick had very different childhoods; Patrick was raised by his amoral father in a traveling carnival, learning to live by exploiting his skill. Patrick had the advantage of seeing the best and worst of humanity, the great and the good passing through the carnival during his youth, while Terry's experience of these highs and lows would come many years later, when he was already in his thirties and had a preestablished view of the world. While this made Terry particularly kind natured, suggestable and naive, Patrick on the other hand became cold and callous; after all his later profession would be one where he used people's tragedy and emotional instability to extort money from them. Terry, on the other hand, is although cautious, inclined to think the best of people, while Patrick's first instinct is to doubt, and fix onto whatever tells he can to make his mind up about the people he meets.

In Terry, this expresses itself in the fact that he's genuine and friendly to everyone he meets, and unlike Patrick's occasional attempts at friendliness with strangers he actually means it. He's not inclined to think badly of anyone, and is sweet, kind and thoughtful, doing whatever he can to help strangers, or just get into the community spirit. He is active, invested in the things he does, and genuine. His smile isn't a mask to the trauma lurking within. Terry cares about people, even if he hardly knows them, and unlike Patrick isn't likely to go around making insensitive remarks. Without his past in illusion and trickery, he isn't likely to play cat and mouse games for his own entertainment, nor for his own ends. He's just a properly nice guy, who finds inspiration in the stories of strangers and pleasure in having as much company as he can get. This is because, unlike Patrick, his interaction with the public wasn't tainted by his efforts to fleece them for money, but to make them enjoy their stay in Elephant Butte.

Because Terry cares, he cares too what people think of him. He's a delicate soul, and he avoids reading reviews of his books when at all possible, though people (his publishers, his friends) do occasionally quote them to him without his permission. Patrick, on the other hand, isn't at all sensitive, and he doesn't get hurt by insults easily. This relates to both his childhood and the murder of his family. Toughened by his childhood, hardened by his loss, Patrick is oil on water, and very little actually gets to him at the end of the day. He is mercurial, but methodical, in that although his methods do lead to a sensible place, it can seem that he is going off on tangents for no reason whatsoever, when in fact it all fits into his long term plan. Terry is more of an A to B person, because his life in New Mexico was very A to B.

Unlike Patrick, who has traveled abroad for only work, Terry has done a lot of living in other countries, and he has a multicultural view of the world. He has a wide range of multicultural knowledge, and had picked up everyday language for many of the countries he's visited, except where it was still possible for him to speak English. His intentions in doing so were to widen his world view, but also - having spent his first thirty years in a sleepy New Mexico town of 1300 people - to experience the freedom that having his writing career granted him. Terry is shy in love, having been hurt before, and becomes very self aware when obvious flirting is returned to him; Patrick is shy in love, having lost his wife, he still wears his wedding band years after her death.

This is most important: the worst things that have happened in Terry's life are the deaths of his parents, and being left by his wife. The worst thing that happened in Patrick's life was the murder of his family. While Patrick has been emotionally wounded by that occasion, traumatised deeply, Terry has escaped that trauma, and led a relatively healthy and happy life.

The influences on Terry's life were New Mexico, where he grew up, the Wild West, the space race, and of course the beautiful coutryside. He became a bit of a sci-fi buff, and adores stories about the unexplained and the unnatural. One of his bucket list things to do is to get abducted by aliens. Terry believes in ghosts, and psychics, government conspiracy and abduction, and that there's more unexplained in the world than has been discovered so far. He immerses himself in the mythology of other cultures, and swears that as a teenager he once had dinner with a chupacabra, although he might have been tripping at the time. His life is one laid back adventure. Patrick, on the other hand, is not only a skeptic, but he thinks he has the world sewn up. He doesn't believe in anything, but he likes winding other skeptics up (his chief target is Teresa Lisbon), whereas Terry is much more likely to get eaten up by a story, again highlighting his naivity. Patrick will often outright tell people that psychics are frauds; especially other psychics, and usually right to their faces. He is contemptuous of it, in fact.

Their professions also affect them differently. Patrick has seen a lot of dead bodies in his work, and has a clinical separation from it. Terry has never seen a dead body, except at a wake, and his life has been relatively death and excitement free. He writes, and his dedication keeps him inside a lot of the time. It's painful for him to be so antisocial, but he gets paid for it, and it lets him lead the kind of life he wants to away from the keyboard. He's almost always thinking about his latest novel, or building characters in his head.

Both men are showmen. Terry used to sing and play the guitar at small functions, and has occasionally given interviews on television. Patrick, too, performed his art to television audiences, but since the loss of his wife he's shunned that particular spotlight. The difference here is more subtle since Patrick will occasionally use the spotlight to make his point, and likes to be the most interesting person in a room, while Terry hasn't been burned by his popularity in the same way; the experience is a less hollow on for him.

Abilities:

Mentalism: an ability?

Patrick Jane is by no means a superhuman, or a real psychic. Mentalism employs the powers of observation to take cold readings of the world around them, following the same methods in most cases as the Detective Sherlock Holmes, such as by noticing a unique smell on the victim's collar, a smudge of lipstick on a glass, a speck of blood that doesn't fit the pattern, a bruise, or an unexplained fleck of bracken. He also profiles victims and suspects on the spot, with accuracy borne of considerable practice. This uniform suggests this, this hairstyle, the unwashed makeup powder on his neck, this casino token.

Still, many of the things that Jane does are enormously different, daring, or just plain inadmissable in a court of law, for example he discerns whether or not someone is lying by watching them for unconscious physical ticks, or holding their hand and surrepticiously measuring their pulse, like a human lie detector. He's often employed a specific method of catching people, or finding hidden objects; Jane explains that he's going to catch them, or that he's going to find said object, and then circles the room, observing the suspected individual until their reaction or deliberate lack of it gives them away.

Jane uses a memory technique known as the Memory Palace to store away information, such that he can access it at will. The Memory Palace technique was popularised in the Hannibal Lecter series, and it allows Jane to appear to have a photographic memory, even for such things as a sequence of numbers, or an address he's only seen once. In Season 5 he demonstrates that he has remembered every single person he's ever shaken hands with, for example.

Jane also employs the basic tricks of an illusionist, using sleight of hand and simple distraction to perform tricks; everything from coin tricks to sleight of hand on a real life scale, using distractions and suggestion to cause people to act in a way that reveals their guilt. He's very fond of reproducing the methods of the most famous TV detectives, either gathering together the suspects for a big reveal, or tricking them into leading them straight to the cash/murder weapon/kidnapping victim etc.

He's also capable of using hypnosis, and simple physical touches or suggestion to make people do what he wants them to. Jane can pick pockets unnoticed, deliberately mess up his tricks--and even drive a car blindfolded, simply by listening and feeling the cues of the passenger in the seat beside him. Patrick is a capable gambler (though he ostensibly only bets on a sure thing), can count cards, manipulate animals, and because of his cold reading is dangerous in both Blackjack and Poker.

He is not good at Spanish. Unlike Terry, who grew up speaking it in New Mexico, and is fluent. One of the things I may potentially want to play with is his loss of fluency.


Roleplay Sample - Third Person:
At some point it had stopped hurting so much; he no longer missed it, missed the CBI, missed Sacramento. He still wrote to Lisbon, his letters being sent to her through his Carnie friends, rather than straight to her home or office--that would be too easy to track. The peace that had come after the death of Red John, dealt by his own hands--it had settled now, a gentle hum, contentment and satisfaction rolled into a single audible sound, that echoed inside his mind. Long stretches of his memory palace lay dusty and empty, untouched, the vast corridors that had once contained nothing but details of the case, files and pictures and bloodied faces painted on the walls, all blissfully abandoned, but left intact in case by some small and horrible error, Red John had still slipped through the cracks.

South America, it had turned out, was incredibly beautiful. Jane had gone as far away from civilisation as he could get, to an island where no more than a dozen people flew in and out each week, to a single dirt track between sea and ocean, where the crashing sea offered lonely rocks and sand and rockpools and water stretching away for tens of thousands of miles in one direction and hundreds in the other. The only land to see were other islands in the archipelago, few well inhabited, and Patrick knew the ins and outs of the little town with the intimacy of a local. Nobody could catch him unprepared.

He walked barefoot from the bar down to the ocean, the dry white sand rough between his toes, and watched the ocean crash steadily against the shore for a while. Steady, repeating, predictable. He exhaled. Nobody could catch him unprepared, he would always have the time, the opportunity, to do everything by his own rules, but he had never accounted for this: not for being found, that was inevitable, but to being found when he had finally settled into this life, when he wanted it.

Pulling himself up onto one of the stormwashed rocks, he looked out toward the gleaming ocean, to the blue grey sky and blue green water, brushed the sand off his feet and folded his arms around his knees. A gull landed on the rock beside him, looking at him most quizzically.

"What do you think, Bertie?" he asked, fishing in his pocket. He tossed the loyal bird a chunk of warm cheese the size of a casino die. "We don't trust him, do we? What with the blackmail, though, that's probably for the--" The bird flew off. "What? That's all I get? Eat and run?" And was this what he was going to spend the rest of his life doing? The same trip every day, the same conversation, the same magic trick, the same bad awful terrible cup of tea, before turning around and heading back home, just the same way that he'd come?


Roleplay Sample - Network:

Video;

This is so cool! Órale! Hola! Hello!

[ The video is smooth, of a man sat at his laptop, slightly bent forward toward it, animated in his obvious delight. ]

Well would you look at this. Secret organisations, aliens, it's like science fiction come to life. Name's Terry James, and yes, maybe you have heard of me. I write the Agent Keen novels. I have to say, the reality is much, much cooler than anything I've ever written about. Que padre wey!

So, show me where all the action is, tell me your stories. I want to hear what's exciting about Locke City. Where the most crazy things happen, how I get in touch with the little green men. I'm dying here.

Any Questions? None!