emoteaddict

Name: Julian Gallagher Fellows

Date of Birth: 29th September

Age: 17

Sex: Male

Appearance:

Tall and slender, he had dark brown hair that he generally does next to nothing with, other than have cut when it grows long enough to annoy him by getting in his eyes, which are a deep puppydog brown. He tends to dress casually, in jeans and t-shirts. He likes comfortable clothes, things he can relax in. He's rarely seen without a notebook of some description and prefers those spiral bound reporter's notebooks. He's got boxes and boxes of them at home. He also always carries an old, battered record bag around with in, in which he carries a couple of spare note pads and a whole host of pens and pencils. Nothing in that bag every gets thrown out - half the pens in there don't work, some of the pencils have broken points (there's a sharpener in there somewhere, but it'd be a hunt to find it).

Special Abilities:

He plays a little guitar, self taught, nothing particularly amazing, it's just another outlet and he's moved onto song writing lately, so he needed some kind of instrument to be able to do that properly. He found as a young teenager that writing helped with his abilities and he's learnt to channel the emotions he's picking up from around him into his writing. As such, he writes almost constantly - short stories, novel bits, poetry, whatever. He draws quite a lot as well, and he's good at it. Those notebooks are full of writing and sketches and whatever else comes to him. It's rare that anything gets properly finished though.

Supernatural Affinity (Species/Group): Human / Psychic

Supernatural Affinity (Powers):

Empath (Level 2)

Personality:

Julian is easy going and friendly - always out to make new friends, in fact. He's popular, in his way, simply because he makes a point of being there for people. He's not so good at keeping up on a day-to-day basis, but if there's drama, or a crisis? Julian is a great go-to guy. He's got himself a reputation for not taking sides in other people's arguments. He'll mediate and listen, he'll keep confidences of those who will share them.

However, whilst Julian is good with mediating between other people, he seems to lack this ability in his own life. In fact, his own life seems to gravitate around drama. Anyone looking in would actually wonder if he purposefully seeks it out. He seems to have a knack for picking fights and making something out of nothing, getting on people's nerves on occasion and generally stiring up, if not trouble, then emotion.

And that observer would be right. Julian isn't entirely aware of his empathy. It's been with him for years, slowly developing. And with its development, he instinctively learned to channel it through his writing, his art and, lately, through his music. At first, it was a coping mechanism, some way to offload the excess of emotions he was experiencing and had no way of dealing with. But, lately, it's become an addiction. He needs more, to fuel his muse, his creativity. He's found himself seeking out dramatic, tense circumstances, making more and more friends, widening his circle, wanting to find the shit that goes on out there. And to create it himself. If he can't find drama from other people's relationships and hurts, then he might just have to make it from scratch. He has a habit to feed, you see...

History:

Julian was born and raised in Marquette, MI, the son of Darren Fellows and Margaret Taylor. There wasn't much to say about his early life - Maggie got pregnant whilst she was dating Darren, they married quickly to cover for it. Shotgun wedding that didn't last, but there were no real hard feelings. Maggie and Darren divorced when Julian was 6, but his father stayed local and Julian still sees him on weekends.

Julian didn't really have much of an exciting childhood. He started drawing early, though his teachers never knew what to make of his mostly abstract crayon drawings. Some of what he produced people found disturbing and it was around the time his parents divorced that he started hiding his work. He'd show what he needed for class, but he always had Other Things that he kept separate. After the age of 7, what he produced in terms of writing and drawing was largely the same as the kid next to him. Boring, monotonous, though his writing style was rather more fluid and coherent than could be expected for a child his age. He didn't, however, show much imagination. His grades were average. In reality, he kept his inspiration for private. That was where he let go.

This carried on through middle school and up into high school. He seemed middle of the road, not overly interested in schoolwork, average. When it came to social groupings, Julian seemed to develop the ability to move fluidly between groups, but yet not stay attached to any. He never seemed to realise that people were grouping off, though that wasn't in fact the case. Julian is well aware of the social hierarchy of the school, it just suits him to ignore it, and he doesn't have the staying power to actually be in a social group - he's too easily distractable. So, he became a drifter in high school, not really belonging anywhere, but welcome most places. He also got himself a reputation as a nightmare boyfriend - hard to please, never quite satisfied. Intense, if you could get to him. Passionate, but passion comes at a price. The gossips always said that being involved with Julian was generally a rollercoaster - there were ups, there were downs, there were definitely thrills, but it was also generally over before it began.

Lately, Julian has started working in his spare time for a volunteer counselling service - telephone only. He's getting some really good stuff from there...

Weaknesses:

Addictive personality - Julian has an addictive personality. He's impulsive, he's after the next fix, he's obsessive about what has his interest - not quite to an OCD degree, he doesn't quite have that staying power, but if something grabs his attention then he's all about that until the next ZOMG!shiny - which, unfortunately, comes all too easily to him. He's very easily distracted and tends not to finish things - Julian is always looking for the next bog thing.

Julian's main addiction isn't drugs, or alcohol - it's emotion. Julian channels his empathy, but a side effect of developing this unusual skill is that it's left him addicted to the emotion. He needs it - he seeks out emotionally driven situations. He loves to see relationships crash and burn. In his own love life he's been known to purposefully sabotage it, to niggle and pick and say just the wrong thing to make her upset. Then again, conversely, he can be the world's most intense boyfriend and lover, sending his girlfriend to highs of emotion as well as lows. The good, the bad - as long as it's in the extremes, he can use it for his fix. He's also been known to pick fights at school, if he's desperate (though he's a terrible fighter, so he has to be desperate). He wants to be the shoulder that everyone cries on, he absolutely adores phonecalls and meetings with crying girls and their latest disaster.

Julian doesn't do anything by halves. He throws himself into everything full throttle. He can be a bit of a drama queen at times, everything is the end of the world, or humanity's latest saviour. It can make him irritating and hard to deal with at times. He's an all or nothing kind of guy. He lives firmly in the moment, he doesn't dwell, he forgives easily and expects everyone else to do the same.

He's insular at times. He wants to be in the middle of everything, he wants to be everybody's best friend, but when it really comes down to it, the only way that he can cope is through his writing, or his drawing. Which means that he has to withdraw at the oddest times. It's given him a strange kind of reputation and some people treat him warily. He's had a few girlfriends in the past who have all come out of the relationship reporting that he can be kind of difficult to deal with.

Julian has his coping mechanisms and he's not really aware that they are, in fact, coping mechanisms. He's not entirely aware of his empathy at all, in fact. What he does know is that he doesn't do well without his pen and paper. In fact, if he's put into a stressful situation and he doesn't have something to write with and on, he'll have a full blown panic attack. He simply cannot cope (you don't want to be around him when he snaps his last pencil). What this also means is that Julian is not a good guy in a fight. Okay, sure, a fist fight at school that's going to be over in five minutes when he can crawl away and write it up? He can cope with that. A full blown knock down, drag out brawl with supernatural beings where people's lives are on the line? Julian is useless. He just can't cope with the overload of emotions in that kind of scenario. The amount of fear (or, for that matter) any other emotion means that he needs to retreat and channel it, but that means he can't actually be of any use in a fight.

Strengths:

Julian doesn't suffer from the usual breakdown problems that an empath risks, because he successfully channels his abilities. That means that in normal circumstances he's rather more stable than most.

PB: Drake Bell