APPLICATION for ATARAXION

[runshouse]

PLAYER INFORMATION
Your Name: Mal
OOC Journal: mustakrakish
Under 18? If yes, what is your age?: old enough for butts
Email + IM:

• AIM: drunkandblogging
• EMAIL: deanpants@gmail.com
• PLURK: stagnation

Characters Played at Ataraxion:

• Dick "Robin" Grayson | Young Justice | unfiltrating
• Kevin Khatchadourian | We Need to Talk About Kevin | oncogenic
• Sherlock Holmes | A Game of Shadows | saidhe
• Sora "Yoite" Koudou | Nabari no ou | maleit

CHARACTER INFORMATION
Name: Bartleby
Canon: Dogma
Original or Alternate Universe: OU
Canon Point: Mid-film. After Loki and Bartleby board the train for New Jersey.
Number: 025

Setting: Dogma wiki

History: Ages and ages ago, back during the first days of Earth, God created the angels and established an entire hierarchy among them. Two befriended each other; the Angel of Death, Loki, and a Grigori by the name of Bartleby, respectively. Despite strict treatment (and even some occasional questioning of their Creator's methods and intentions), the angels all dutifully carried out their respective tasks as they were so intended. More or less.

Loki was made to kill all of the first-borns in Egypt in concurrence with the plagues, and in the aftermath, he and Bartleby went out for a drink (celebrating, commiserating, or otherwise). Bartleby, who is, in layman's terms, a guardian angel of sorts, spent his time (and job, really) studying and understanding the humans - as a consequence, he felt a deep level of sympathy for the creatures, and while very thoroughly inebriated, he brought up the notion with Loki. By some means, he managed to convince Loki to cease his slaughter of the humans in the name of God and, partially out of true agreement and more so out of copious amounts of alcohol, Loki complies. Vehemently so; he casts down his fiery sword and gives God a good ol' one-fingered salute.

God, in turn, decides to banish the two to a fate worse than Hell: eternity in Wisconsin.

And so that's how it all ends and simultaneously begins.

Bartleby and Loki spend over a millennium in the United States, miserable, very lost, but trying to make the best of this shitheap. There seems to be little they can do about their fate until a Catholic church in New Jersey decides to celebrate its centennial anniversary with a plenary indulgence (in Catholic theology, it's essentially a pardon for temporal punishments due for past sins). Bartleby is sent a newspaper article on the event anonymously through the mail, and uses the information (as well as a loophole in Catholic Dogma) in order to hatch a plan for Loki and himself. Their sins forgiven, they're free to die as mortals and return to heaven anew. They're going home.

Of course, they've missed a minor detail in the whole matter. God is infallible. Their success in their endeavor would mean to prove God wrong, and in doing such, they will successfully negate the entire fucking omniverse. As a result, they've got everyone out looking for them - everyone. Above is pissed because, well, they don't want all of existence to blink out. Below's pissed because Bartleby and Loki are about to succeed where Lucifer hasn't for all of these years. So after those two are angels, demons, apostles, prophets, even the only known living relative of Jesus Christ himself, the Last Scion.

Bartleby and Loki are blissfully unaware, and take a detour in their trip to slaughter (well, for Loki to slaughter, really) not only an adulterous couple on a bus, but the executives of Mooby the Golden Calf and consequential creators of a false idol. Commandment breakers left and right, Loki's taking advantage of his soon-to-be clean slate. They do, however, miss the bus to New Jersey, and consider flying there instead - manually.

As it turns out, Azrael, a demon, was the one to send them the article on the church anniversary. What they don't know is that he's counting on existence blinking out because of these two assholes, because he'd rather not exist than live in hell any longer. What they do find out is that they're attracting all the wrong kinds of attention, and in order to keep his plan on track, Azrael advises them to lie low and, y'know, stop fucking murdering a bunch of people. They take the train to New Jersey instead.

At least it's supposed to go to New Jersey. whoever knew that there was a train that went all the way into space, physics are so damn weird


Personality: Bartleby is a very different man at the start of the film than he transforms into by the end. Comparatively, when paired with Loki, he's the inarguably more scholarly of the two; such probably comes with the job. As a Watcher, Bartleby spends much of his time, usually, observing rather than partaking, reacting rather than acting. He's a bit of an anchor to a lot of Loki's petulance, working as the calmer half of the pair, weighing heavily on reason and planning.

Of course, with the job also comes a certain degree of cynicism. Bartleby knows people, and he knows people very well - of course entailing the very best along with the very worst of all of them. Despite the ostensible responsibility, Bartleby's got a very dark humor (he and Loki openly joke about murder, child abuse, even genocide), though this can also reasonably be attributed to his lengthy and likely very colorful past. Dude's seen a lot of shit. Consequentially, most of his words come barbed with a lot of sarcasm and sharp jabs, usually observational ones (albeit generally meant in good humor as well).

Beyond the jocular sardonicism, there's a less sturdy side of Bartleby, one that, while he's openly upbeat and optimistic about returning home to Heaven, doesn't take much to spark and really boil over. He's able to question why humans are so very flawed and yet ultimately forgiven by God unconditionally when he and Loki still go punished for their millennium-old slights.

There's a part of him that's intensely jealous of humans, even if he isn't even necessarily aware of this fact for a long time. After all, it's not triggered until later on in the movie, but it's still a far cry from the Bartleby who (though drunkenly, jokingly) is willing to lay his future on the line because of the compassion he has for these mortals. The idea is one he hasn't come to terms to at his canon point, may not have ever if it hadn't been for what Bethany said to him on their train ride together, but the fact still remains that it very much exists.

Regardless of the inner turmoil with God he might occasionally wrestle with, even on Earth, Bartleby is still absolutely a Grigori first and foremost. He watches. He observes. Though he invests a lot of stock in his words, speeches, lectures, he puts just as much importance on listening as well, and genuinely enjoys hearing people's thoughts on any amount of issues (possibly because he can only observe as is, and he doesn't know these people's actual insight on what they do and why they do it). He's a very good-natured, very intelligent, very initially laid-back kind of guy, despite all and everything that's happened to him in the past.

And, most prominently, just merely wants to go back home, and won't stop at much to complete this goal.


Abilities, Weaknesses and Power Limitations: Angels in the Dogma universe, physically, aren't very physiologically different from humans. They've got some parts lacking down south, and, okay, wings when they so feel like showing them off, but ostensibly, they look very much the same. Underneath, there's probably a few more changes.

At the very least, they're immortal. Angels can't be mortally wounded unless they've had their wings cut off. In fact, they can't seem to be very wounded at all, according to a panicked reporter's shouts about bullets not affecting their bodies when Bartleby slaughters an entire crowd of onlookers at the end of the movie. They don't need normal human functions like food, water, oxygen - in fact, given the ban on such privileges as detailed by the Metatron to Bethany, they're not even allowed to do so (eat and drink, at least, they can breathe all they want) after Bartleby's and Loki's infamous drunken excursion. They can still taste and enjoy flavor, evidenced by Bartleby's spitting out popcorn kernels into a spare box, or Metatron similarly drinking tequila but not swallowing.

Angels also exhibit some strength beyond that which is human, as Bartleby is able to easily break a man's neck with only a hand. At the same time, they also both got thrown off a train by a chubby human dude, so it's really not too impressive on that front.

he's wearing armor later on too when he takes off his t-shirt and i'm really not sure if this is like an angel skill thing or their natural form or if they're just wearing it all the time like weirdos but basically yes gonna note this here i suppose

Bartleby's specific archetype of angel is a Grigori, also known as a "watcher". They- you know, watch. It means he knows an awful lot about an awful lot - he's held privy to the inner lives of mortals around him, always able to pick out what dirty laundry they might have hiding. The best descriptor I can give for what he does is an essential reading of the soul - Bartleby can see the good and the bad, the stains and indiscretions in which people have partaken in the past. The specifics of this aren't thoroughly explored in canon, but this ability would not only require a permissions post for anyone he might look into, but may have to be partially nerfed in order to account for crew members he may not be allowed to know significant information about.

or maybe not?! plot twist.


Inventory:

• One (1) maroon hoodie
• One (1) grey t-shirt
• One (1) black peacoat
• One (1) pair of jeans
• One (1) envelope containing a folded newspaper article

Appearance:
[ left ] [ right ] [ now with detachable wings!! ]

Age: oh hell i don't even know, millions of years. billions of years? really really fucking old, man.

AU Clarification:

SAMPLES
Log Sample:
God, he's immediately cursing in his mind, but he doesn't have much to say to God right now, so he corrects it into, fuck, instead, and watches the blue whatever this is sloughing off him in gobs and puddles.

It's not like he nodded off on the train or anything. He'd just been getting onto the damn thing, no harm, no foul, and then suddenly he had a fucking tube down his throat? It wasn't like he hadn't seen weirder, but come on. Of course, as he's giving a good wide sweep of the room at all the other glass cases with people similarly spilling out, as he swipes a haphazard thumb at the numbers inked into his skin, he has to give it credit for at least being up there. Way up there. Well, pretty up there.

Was this even Earth anymore? It didn't feel like Earth, the air didn't smell like Earth, taste like Earth, but he really doesn't know why he'd be anywhere else right now. Bartleby paws at some of the stasis fluid in his hair, sweeps it onto the floor in a flourish of his fingers and, despite the gritty feeling in his throat from the intubation, LAUGHS a bit, something small and ironic and just that edge of psychotic. Upset.

Because what he does very reliably notice, and return to again, is that it's definitely not the train, it's definitely not - presumably, he's gonna go out on a limb here and probably say it's safe to say - on the way to Jersey, he's HOPING, anyway, because otherwise somebody in the dredges of some backwater state has evolved beyond the typical catch and release horror movie cliche. Like the Bloody Benders but with tech. Deliverance but in space and with some really, really questionable choice in victim.

You know, and he turns his eyes skyward, because he does have a little something to say to God, listening or not.

"Are you shitting me?"


Comms Sample:
[ AUDIO ]

Okay, yeah, it's a phone! Sort of?

[ It's cool, it's new, not that technology's really his shtick and he's not going to start pretending it is when he was just in the nineties and now he's standing on a fucking spaceship. ]

So, let's checklist: I'm partaking in a science fiction movie, I woke up more or less naked, violated with tubes. [ You can practically hear him ticking these off on his fingers as he talks. He pauses a beat, going a bit higher and indignant. ] You know, can I ask about that, because everybody seems pretty okay with this development so far, and maybe it's just a personal point when I say that's not my usual afternoon! That's not how I spend my time. Is it a fetish thing? It's really okay if it's a fetish thing. I had a couple bucks in my pocket too. I think I got ripped off in all this.

[ There's a bit of deeper meaning to that, probably. Definitely. Bartleby's voice sifts, a darker flicker in it for a moment. ]

I guess I'm farther from home than I bargained for.