#josiah laroche

[teddypoi-qd]

Samuel Lane/Carrion Crowe :: He/Him :: Early 30s

Story: Real People (Drama, Mystery, Supernatural)

Carrion Crowe is a prolific sci-fi author enjoying his niche notoriety and avoiding Netflix adaptations of his work like the plague. Since his rise to fame as a prodigy author at the age of 17, he's gone from strength to strength in his career, sharing the stories that have lived in his mind and protected himself for as long as he can remember.

Samuel Lane is a chronic daydreamer whose story begins in earnest when it becomes all too clear that he's shared too much of himself. The fictions he's cloaked his life in become the vicious weapon of threats both real and imagined.

When the world splits in half in front of his eyes, shadows in the shape of aliens start to lurk around him. His imaginings start to leak out of his head and put people he loves in danger. To save them, he must face up to the responsibilities he's been running from since he was a child.

Likes: astrobiology & space science as a whole, corvids, clubbing

Dislikes: people 'knowing' him, spicy food (coward), people who can't do a thought experiment

Physical: Samuel is a short, brown-skinned guy with a scruffy salt-and-pepper beard and moustache. It's very clear that he doesn't look after himself well. When he's functioning at his best, or he has someone regulating him, he can clean up pretty well and be pretty handsome, but it isn't his natural state, especially when the story starts.

He dresses for comfort over everything, but what that comfort is will fluctuate between very loose oversized clothes and things that provide compression/pressure. The exceptions to his usual comfort-first & scruffy approach are when he's dressing for clubbing, and when he's making public appearances as an author. He'll put his best foot forward when he's presenting himself to an audience, able to dissociate the person he is whilst he's out from the person he believes he is in his core. He's pretty neutral about his body, but knows that other people can find him attractive if he puts in the work, and will play to that.

Personality & Traits: A core part of Samuel's characterisation is the fact that he is a chronic daydreamer. He uses the worlds he's dreamed up as escapes from reality, opting out of a reality that bores him to one where he feels much more engaged and at home. However, as his stress levels rise, he more often falls into his imagined worlds involuntarily, and finds it significantly harder to leave them. He can differentiate the worlds he walks through, but when he starts to adopt the people around him into his imagined worlds, it becomes harder for him to understand what parts of them he's projected, and what's actually core to them. His misunderstanding of others has caused a lot of issues for him, but the understandings themselves have never been directly challenged for him to know that they're there at all.

Samuel likes to be admired, but doesn't try to make himself likeable. He's abrasive and stubborn, and consistently convinced that he's right. However, when presented with solid evidence to the contrary, he might be able to be convinced. If you catch him on a good day, or he likes you.

He's simultaneously very closed off, and desperate for connection, which he often finds through anonymous hookups and (probably undernegotiated) BDSM at his local kink club. If, for whatever reason, you make the effort to get to know him, he is fiercely loyal. Once he cares about you, that never goes away, even if you don't talk for years. If you betray his trust after that, he'll be hurt, but consider your betrayal as his own fault, rather than something intentional on your behalf, again pointing to his very self-centred way of viewing the world.

Samuel is incredibly passionate about the things he cares about, and if given a safe space to share them, he will with joy. He is quite self aware of this, though, and will tamp down on showing his excitement to anyone he doesn't trust fully. In these cases, his passion may come across more like a lecture than anything else.

He is convinced that sapient aliens exist, in such a way that it's not a belief, but a knowledge in the same way one might say they know that atoms exist. He doesn't know if humanity will ever encounter them, but he knows they're out there. He's aware this is a niche idea, and doesn't care to debate it, so often couches this knowledge in the framework of his stories.

Relationships: In general - Samuel finds it hard to get close to people. The people he is closest to are those he's known for a long time, or that he's been paired with by circumstance. He regards anyone related to his work as an author as expendable and changeable. Editors cycle out, agents give up on him, so he does not make the effort to connect with them. All they want is his stories, and all he wants from them is their reach. Their relationship remains business.

Josiah LaRoche (Jo) (he/him)- Samuel's childhood friend, and the reason his work was ever published. Josiah sent off Samuel's first finished manuscript without him knowing, and that story rocketed Samuel to fame. They haven't spoken properly in at least a decade. When Samuel returns to his home town, Josiah is the first person he sees, and it seems like he hasn't changed a bit, except to get hotter. Samuel wants to pick up the friendship where it was left, but Josiah has changed more than he wants to acknowledge, and that puts a strain on the old dynamic. Samuel's newfound attraction to the other man is also a new element, and one he's not exactly ready to confront. Josiah's straight, after all.

Tutu Lane (Turtle Dove) (she/her) - Samuel's younger sister. The pair grew up raising each other, more than with any adult supervision. Samuel sees himself as a stand-in parent to Turtle, but Turtle is proudly independent. She loves her brother, but was firm in needing her own space to grow. Since they grew apart, she's started doing a doctorate in astroagriculture, focusing on growing hardy, nutrient-rich food in the bizarre environs that space and other planets provide. They haven't talked in a few months. When Samuel returns home, he expects to find her in the family home. She isn't there. No one's seen her in a while.

Geiger (she/they) & Albert Elmer (he/him) - Samuel can't face a world of new horrors alone. He meets Albert and Geiger as he attempts to track down his sister, and learns that they, too, have seen the world split in half. They have their own theories, but they might be exactly what he needs to help him. He sees them, to begin with, as assistants. As they work together to uncover the truth of the shadows they're seeing, he might well grow to see them as equals, with stories just as rich as his own.