Profile for Long
Feb. 16th, 2013 02:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imperial_longJUST THE FACTS, MA'AM
Name: Mayland Long
Aliases: Oolong
Age and/or birthday: He does not remember, but it's about five thousand years ago. Physically he is somewhere indeterminately between 40 and 60. Probably.
Fandom/Media/OC?: The books Tea with the Black Dragon, Twisting the Rope, and Raphael, by R.A. MacAvoy
Programmed Possession:A number of books that came with his hotel room; he abandoned the room, but took the books with him he lost the books when Gwen electrocuted him, so currently, nothing
Arrival date: 17 December 2010
I am...: An ancient Chinese imperial dragon in human form. Unwillingly.
BODY OF EVIDENCE
Describe your character physically. Long is neither tall nor large; he is a slender dark-skinned man who is maybe five-foot-seven? In appearance he is Asian-- ostensibly Chinese, but Long himself says that 'while I was born in China, I am not entirely Chinese'; he has high cheekbones and a long nose and lean, alert features. His eyes are mutable depending on the light and his mood, and can be anything from opaque brown to gleaming gold. They glow in the dark. His hair is black and always worn in exactly the same perfectly combed and trimmed style. His fingers are much too long (which he is somewhat self-conscious about, and will often stuff them into his pockets).
What does your character wear? Long is apparently not aware of the existence of fabrics in color. His wardrobe is impeccable, and monochromatic. Whites, blacks, grays. Much raw silk in terms of fabrics. In Taxon he adheres to a Western mode of dress, suit jackets and dress shirts and polished Oxford shoes.
Except that he secretly hates wearing shoes and will take them off whenever he can.
That covers what they look like. What do they sound like? Long has the voice of a much larger man-- deep and resonant, a marvelous radio voice. When speaking English, he speaks with an impeccable and proper and very Oxford British accent. When speaking other languages, he sounds equally as native in his pronunciation and idioms.
Running down the list of the five senses.... smell? There is a faint smell of cedar about his person, a dry, sharp smell. Beyond that, whatever he uses on his hair, and presumably some sort of aftershave. Always quite clean.
Touch & Taste. Uh, okay there. If you were to come into physical contact with Long (which he rather avoids), you would notice his skin is warmer than average. It's quite smooth and taut, 'like the finish of a statue'. Long's blood tastes spicy and quite delicious to vampires.
The fine, fine details: The aforementioned heat-- Long's body temperature is maybe 3 degrees higher than it should be-- and the fact that he's surprisingly light, lighter even than his slight build would suggest. He's maybe like 120, 130 pounds?
PB differences? Long is darker than his icons reflect-- in canon, he is frequently mistaken for "a black man" by other characters.
BENEATH LE SURFACE Once upon a time in China the Black Dragon was occupied with the traditional pursuits of dragons: collecting objets d'art, writing letters to his friends, and eating oxen and people. Somewhere along the way he became quite fascinated by people and discovered they had more applications than merely serving as the dessert course.
Oolong, the Black Dragon, was basically a fanboy for the human species when it came to their capacity for art and philosophy, pursuits that did not come naturally to him. Especially the human obsession with 'truth' -- Buddha and Confucius and all the others who put such effort into devising a right way to live. What focused them so? What was this 'truth' and enlightenment they were seeking? Oolong became fixated on discovering truth for himself, but, being a dragon, of a dry and scholarly and methodical temperament, has rather approached this quest as if there were a convenient box named 'truth' lying around somewhere.
In the course of his seeking he has communicated with numerous human sages and religious figures, from Bodhisattva to John Donne. He once ran afoul of Lucifer (while attempting to obtain a copy of Dante's Inferno), and as a result spent 22 years chained up in a mountain until being freed by a witch with a grievance against Lucifer herself. Oolong has traveled the world, learning and learning and learning but never satisfied that he had discovered truth...
In 1977 he sought out a supposed wise man in Taipei, an old military man near the end of his life. Yung Chung-jo told Oolong that Oolong was a fool-- but that Oolong would find what he sought, and would lose all that he had in the process. Oolong coiled around the old man to shield him from the rain, and thus passed the night; in the morning, the old man was dead, and Oolong found himself in a small and vulnerable and mortal human body.
This required a good deal of adjustment. And a lot of drinking.
Long spent six years getting the hang of being human, to an extent; he also followed other words of Yung Chung-Jo's prophecy and left Taiwan and China for the other side of the ocean, settling in San Francisco. He had acclimated to a more-or-less-comfortable, if stalled, existence when he was abruptly and rudely abducted to Taxon.
Long tends to regard Taxon as merely another necessary step along his prophesied path to enlightenment, and thus is not nearly as bothered by the city as some people might be. That isn't to say he bears the aliens good will-- they have forced him to be naked in public in Taxon, and to ride a motorcycle while naked, and both of these things are grievous slights that will not be forgiven anytime soon.... but all the same, Long has absolute confidence that his existence is proceeding along a certain course for a certain reason, and therefore is not THAT fussed by zombies, electrocution, or most of the rest of Taxon's fun and games.
In Taxon, he has been returned to his 'proper' form three times now. He dearly wishes he could find a way to make this arrangement permanent.
Who matters? Of those currently in Taxon, he is probably closest to Glitch. Glitch is his drinking buddy, his talking-literature buddy, his tell-me-about-OZ-buddy, and his hot-tubbing-while-discussing-philosophy buddy.
He is more generally and vaguely fond of Sherlock (his loudmouthed boy sidekick), Azkadellia (she does so enjoy learning), Wyatt Cain (well, tea), and Bagoas (someone to talk Farsi and Greek with!), and Spike (another language student).
He quite misses Gwen Raiden and Fred Burkle.
Personality & Psychology: Long is patient, prim, pedantic, and polite. You can sum up 90% of everything about him with those four Ps.
While he certainly does have emotions, the full extent of human experience and drama is something he still just does not get. He fakes it pretty well, but if you take Long out of a setting where he can small-talk and offer tea and quote literature, he will tend to flounder-- he has little 'him' to talk about, in some respects. He uses the words of others as crutches for his own deficiencies as a human being.
He's got an ego the size of a mountain, which manifests in both his scrupulous and fastidious attention to his appearance, and his enjoying having an audience for his stories, and also his continuing difficulties in comprehending that things are actually threats to him. He's better at that last than he used to be-- being electrocuted has proven to him he is very definitely mortal-- but it's still often hard for him to wrap his brain around the fact that he is NOT a nigh-invulnerable 90-foot-long dragon, but a middle-aged human instead. An exceptional human in many regards, but still one that bleeds when cut.
Long is insufferably courteous-- and nosy about other people, curious and occasionally meddlesome. It's a balancing act between his sense of etiquette and his incessant 'ooh what's YOUR story'. --and 'story' is how he often thinks of things, which is one of the core things that sets him apart from a regular person; if someone tells Long the tragic story of their life, his gut reaction is to appreciate it as a story, to analyze it for irony and dramatic hubris and excellent pacing, at which point he might either make a small satisfied nod of approval for a harrowing tale (or perhaps cluck in slight disapproval if not). And then he comes around to remembering that this is not 'a story' for the person he is talking to, but intensely personal tragedy, and tries to make the appropriate social noises for that. It would be fair to say that, while he's quite capable of sympathy and compassion, he has a much harder time with empathy.
Long is stuffy in many respects, but he also has a great love for puns, jokes, word games, and innuendo. He can often be joking and not have it realized by his conversational partners; he has a great poker face and then some. He also has a buried hedonistic streak but heyo.
He is also a bit of a showoff, and in his way.... childlike? at times. Five-thousand years old and all but he can still get very pleased with himself over simple, everyday things, if it's the first time he's managed to figure it out. Glitch's compliment that he was a good person made Long as happy as a first-grader being told their drawing was good.
Skills, Powers, Weaknesses, and et cetera: In a stroke of marvelously Mary-Sue canon, Long speaks all the languages. Like, seriously, all of them. Languages are one of his big passions; according to him, he has learned all of the 'major human tongues', but, according to canon, he has definitely invested energy in learning the non-major ones as well. He speaks things as obscure as Lappish (Saami) and can sound like a native doing so. Basically, at some point, he went all 'Gotta catch 'em all' on the linguistic history of the human species.
(In Taxon, he also was learning Klingon for a little while, and can likely manage basic conversation in that tongue.)
Aside from that, Long is something of a walking encyclopedia for history, philosophy, and art. See: fanboy of the human species. He loves stories, and collects them, and will tell them at the slightest encouragement. While his focus is more on what we would call 'the humanities' nowadays, Long is also interested in science and technology; he takes fairly quickly to any sort of machinery and has a very rational, puzzle-solving mind. He is quite intelligent, and extraordinarily broadly-read.
However, while his knowledge is vast, a lot of exists ONLY on the scale of books. He has read about how to splint a broken bone/solder circuits/bake a soufflé; he has never actually done so. In some cases Long's abstract knowledge is enough to let him be good at the task in question; in other cases it is definitely not.
Physically, Long is quite strong and fast-- stronger than a human his size and build ought to be. His hands in particular are very strong; he can yank a doorknob out from the door, or break open a steel lock with his fingers. While he is not invulnerable, he does seem to have an exceptional capacity for tolerating pain and injury, and for recovering from them very quickly as well.
He has a certain skill (and affinity) for breaking necks, and a certain instinctive ability for fighting; this should in no way be confused with 'trained martial arts'. Long fights the way an animal does; he would not hesitate to bite someone's throat in the heat of battle, but would merely look at you with infinite disdain and confusion if you were to ask if he knows 'karate'.
His senses are very keen, and it's suggested he can see in the dark.
He falls asleep anywhere, anytime. Add sunlight and watch him melt.
Sexytiems: Long has, technically, had sex. With humans even. This was done as much out of a spirit of intellectual curiosity as it was being horny. By human standards he would have a pretty low sex drive; by his standards he is just like, you're all mammalian bipeds, none of you are really that arousing.
(RP-wise, while I am not categorically saying Long could NEVER get involved with someone, I consider it highly unlikely. Long is taken from a canon point shortly before he meets and falls in love with the love of his life, and they're kinda my OMG ONE TRUE PAIRING TO RULE ALL ONE TRUE PAIRINGS, so.... it would have to be some damn convincing RP to make me buy Long in a relationship with someone else. Just saying.)
Best way to meet this character: Long tries to greet all new arrivals, if not quite at their arrival, shortly after it. His name would be known to any new arrival who reads the introductory file on the tablet, since he signed it. He is in the Library a good deal of the time; if not at the Library he can also be encountered at many of the restaurants of Taxon, sampling all the foods. He is quite amiable and approachable to new arrivals, and will do his best to help them get situated and answer any questions they may have.
PERMISSIONS
THE MIND: Long's mind is old and full of many books. He has no resistances/defenses against it being read, but would be rather annoyed at the violation of his privacy.
THE BODY: I am cool with physical harm! If you want stuff to happen, let's talk OOCly.
FUNKY STUFF: Characters can psychically know stuff about Long, but check with me OOC that you're getting the right stuff for him.
PRIVACY: Threadhopping is gravy, unlocked posts are gravy, locked posts talk to me, no he will not hide his position on the map.
SURPRISE!: Run it by me if you want a character to sneak up on Long. He's pretty sharp-of-senses when he's awake. On the other hand, he drowses a LOT.
MISCELLANEOUS
probably sticking a ton of canon quotes here sooner or later. yes.
Name: Mayland Long
Aliases: Oolong
Age and/or birthday: He does not remember, but it's about five thousand years ago. Physically he is somewhere indeterminately between 40 and 60. Probably.
Fandom/Media/OC?: The books Tea with the Black Dragon, Twisting the Rope, and Raphael, by R.A. MacAvoy
Programmed Possession:
Arrival date: 17 December 2010
I am...: An ancient Chinese imperial dragon in human form. Unwillingly.
BODY OF EVIDENCE
Describe your character physically. Long is neither tall nor large; he is a slender dark-skinned man who is maybe five-foot-seven? In appearance he is Asian-- ostensibly Chinese, but Long himself says that 'while I was born in China, I am not entirely Chinese'; he has high cheekbones and a long nose and lean, alert features. His eyes are mutable depending on the light and his mood, and can be anything from opaque brown to gleaming gold. They glow in the dark. His hair is black and always worn in exactly the same perfectly combed and trimmed style. His fingers are much too long (which he is somewhat self-conscious about, and will often stuff them into his pockets).
What does your character wear? Long is apparently not aware of the existence of fabrics in color. His wardrobe is impeccable, and monochromatic. Whites, blacks, grays. Much raw silk in terms of fabrics. In Taxon he adheres to a Western mode of dress, suit jackets and dress shirts and polished Oxford shoes.
Except that he secretly hates wearing shoes and will take them off whenever he can.
That covers what they look like. What do they sound like? Long has the voice of a much larger man-- deep and resonant, a marvelous radio voice. When speaking English, he speaks with an impeccable and proper and very Oxford British accent. When speaking other languages, he sounds equally as native in his pronunciation and idioms.
Running down the list of the five senses.... smell? There is a faint smell of cedar about his person, a dry, sharp smell. Beyond that, whatever he uses on his hair, and presumably some sort of aftershave. Always quite clean.
Touch & Taste. Uh, okay there. If you were to come into physical contact with Long (which he rather avoids), you would notice his skin is warmer than average. It's quite smooth and taut, 'like the finish of a statue'. Long's blood tastes spicy and quite delicious to vampires.
The fine, fine details: The aforementioned heat-- Long's body temperature is maybe 3 degrees higher than it should be-- and the fact that he's surprisingly light, lighter even than his slight build would suggest. He's maybe like 120, 130 pounds?
PB differences? Long is darker than his icons reflect-- in canon, he is frequently mistaken for "a black man" by other characters.
BENEATH LE SURFACE Once upon a time in China the Black Dragon was occupied with the traditional pursuits of dragons: collecting objets d'art, writing letters to his friends, and eating oxen and people. Somewhere along the way he became quite fascinated by people and discovered they had more applications than merely serving as the dessert course.
Oolong, the Black Dragon, was basically a fanboy for the human species when it came to their capacity for art and philosophy, pursuits that did not come naturally to him. Especially the human obsession with 'truth' -- Buddha and Confucius and all the others who put such effort into devising a right way to live. What focused them so? What was this 'truth' and enlightenment they were seeking? Oolong became fixated on discovering truth for himself, but, being a dragon, of a dry and scholarly and methodical temperament, has rather approached this quest as if there were a convenient box named 'truth' lying around somewhere.
In the course of his seeking he has communicated with numerous human sages and religious figures, from Bodhisattva to John Donne. He once ran afoul of Lucifer (while attempting to obtain a copy of Dante's Inferno), and as a result spent 22 years chained up in a mountain until being freed by a witch with a grievance against Lucifer herself. Oolong has traveled the world, learning and learning and learning but never satisfied that he had discovered truth...
In 1977 he sought out a supposed wise man in Taipei, an old military man near the end of his life. Yung Chung-jo told Oolong that Oolong was a fool-- but that Oolong would find what he sought, and would lose all that he had in the process. Oolong coiled around the old man to shield him from the rain, and thus passed the night; in the morning, the old man was dead, and Oolong found himself in a small and vulnerable and mortal human body.
This required a good deal of adjustment. And a lot of drinking.
Long spent six years getting the hang of being human, to an extent; he also followed other words of Yung Chung-Jo's prophecy and left Taiwan and China for the other side of the ocean, settling in San Francisco. He had acclimated to a more-or-less-comfortable, if stalled, existence when he was abruptly and rudely abducted to Taxon.
Long tends to regard Taxon as merely another necessary step along his prophesied path to enlightenment, and thus is not nearly as bothered by the city as some people might be. That isn't to say he bears the aliens good will-- they have forced him to be naked in public in Taxon, and to ride a motorcycle while naked, and both of these things are grievous slights that will not be forgiven anytime soon.... but all the same, Long has absolute confidence that his existence is proceeding along a certain course for a certain reason, and therefore is not THAT fussed by zombies, electrocution, or most of the rest of Taxon's fun and games.
In Taxon, he has been returned to his 'proper' form three times now. He dearly wishes he could find a way to make this arrangement permanent.
Who matters? Of those currently in Taxon, he is probably closest to Glitch. Glitch is his drinking buddy, his talking-literature buddy, his tell-me-about-OZ-buddy, and his hot-tubbing-while-discussing-philosophy buddy.
He is more generally and vaguely fond of Sherlock (his loudmouthed boy sidekick), Azkadellia (she does so enjoy learning), Wyatt Cain (well, tea), and Bagoas (someone to talk Farsi and Greek with!), and Spike (another language student).
He quite misses Gwen Raiden and Fred Burkle.
Personality & Psychology: Long is patient, prim, pedantic, and polite. You can sum up 90% of everything about him with those four Ps.
While he certainly does have emotions, the full extent of human experience and drama is something he still just does not get. He fakes it pretty well, but if you take Long out of a setting where he can small-talk and offer tea and quote literature, he will tend to flounder-- he has little 'him' to talk about, in some respects. He uses the words of others as crutches for his own deficiencies as a human being.
He's got an ego the size of a mountain, which manifests in both his scrupulous and fastidious attention to his appearance, and his enjoying having an audience for his stories, and also his continuing difficulties in comprehending that things are actually threats to him. He's better at that last than he used to be-- being electrocuted has proven to him he is very definitely mortal-- but it's still often hard for him to wrap his brain around the fact that he is NOT a nigh-invulnerable 90-foot-long dragon, but a middle-aged human instead. An exceptional human in many regards, but still one that bleeds when cut.
Long is insufferably courteous-- and nosy about other people, curious and occasionally meddlesome. It's a balancing act between his sense of etiquette and his incessant 'ooh what's YOUR story'. --and 'story' is how he often thinks of things, which is one of the core things that sets him apart from a regular person; if someone tells Long the tragic story of their life, his gut reaction is to appreciate it as a story, to analyze it for irony and dramatic hubris and excellent pacing, at which point he might either make a small satisfied nod of approval for a harrowing tale (or perhaps cluck in slight disapproval if not). And then he comes around to remembering that this is not 'a story' for the person he is talking to, but intensely personal tragedy, and tries to make the appropriate social noises for that. It would be fair to say that, while he's quite capable of sympathy and compassion, he has a much harder time with empathy.
Long is stuffy in many respects, but he also has a great love for puns, jokes, word games, and innuendo. He can often be joking and not have it realized by his conversational partners; he has a great poker face and then some. He also has a buried hedonistic streak but heyo.
He is also a bit of a showoff, and in his way.... childlike? at times. Five-thousand years old and all but he can still get very pleased with himself over simple, everyday things, if it's the first time he's managed to figure it out. Glitch's compliment that he was a good person made Long as happy as a first-grader being told their drawing was good.
Skills, Powers, Weaknesses, and et cetera: In a stroke of marvelously Mary-Sue canon, Long speaks all the languages. Like, seriously, all of them. Languages are one of his big passions; according to him, he has learned all of the 'major human tongues', but, according to canon, he has definitely invested energy in learning the non-major ones as well. He speaks things as obscure as Lappish (Saami) and can sound like a native doing so. Basically, at some point, he went all 'Gotta catch 'em all' on the linguistic history of the human species.
(In Taxon, he also was learning Klingon for a little while, and can likely manage basic conversation in that tongue.)
Aside from that, Long is something of a walking encyclopedia for history, philosophy, and art. See: fanboy of the human species. He loves stories, and collects them, and will tell them at the slightest encouragement. While his focus is more on what we would call 'the humanities' nowadays, Long is also interested in science and technology; he takes fairly quickly to any sort of machinery and has a very rational, puzzle-solving mind. He is quite intelligent, and extraordinarily broadly-read.
However, while his knowledge is vast, a lot of exists ONLY on the scale of books. He has read about how to splint a broken bone/solder circuits/bake a soufflé; he has never actually done so. In some cases Long's abstract knowledge is enough to let him be good at the task in question; in other cases it is definitely not.
Physically, Long is quite strong and fast-- stronger than a human his size and build ought to be. His hands in particular are very strong; he can yank a doorknob out from the door, or break open a steel lock with his fingers. While he is not invulnerable, he does seem to have an exceptional capacity for tolerating pain and injury, and for recovering from them very quickly as well.
He has a certain skill (and affinity) for breaking necks, and a certain instinctive ability for fighting; this should in no way be confused with 'trained martial arts'. Long fights the way an animal does; he would not hesitate to bite someone's throat in the heat of battle, but would merely look at you with infinite disdain and confusion if you were to ask if he knows 'karate'.
His senses are very keen, and it's suggested he can see in the dark.
He falls asleep anywhere, anytime. Add sunlight and watch him melt.
Sexytiems: Long has, technically, had sex. With humans even. This was done as much out of a spirit of intellectual curiosity as it was being horny. By human standards he would have a pretty low sex drive; by his standards he is just like, you're all mammalian bipeds, none of you are really that arousing.
(RP-wise, while I am not categorically saying Long could NEVER get involved with someone, I consider it highly unlikely. Long is taken from a canon point shortly before he meets and falls in love with the love of his life, and they're kinda my OMG ONE TRUE PAIRING TO RULE ALL ONE TRUE PAIRINGS, so.... it would have to be some damn convincing RP to make me buy Long in a relationship with someone else. Just saying.)
Best way to meet this character: Long tries to greet all new arrivals, if not quite at their arrival, shortly after it. His name would be known to any new arrival who reads the introductory file on the tablet, since he signed it. He is in the Library a good deal of the time; if not at the Library he can also be encountered at many of the restaurants of Taxon, sampling all the foods. He is quite amiable and approachable to new arrivals, and will do his best to help them get situated and answer any questions they may have.
PERMISSIONS
THE MIND: Long's mind is old and full of many books. He has no resistances/defenses against it being read, but would be rather annoyed at the violation of his privacy.
THE BODY: I am cool with physical harm! If you want stuff to happen, let's talk OOCly.
FUNKY STUFF: Characters can psychically know stuff about Long, but check with me OOC that you're getting the right stuff for him.
PRIVACY: Threadhopping is gravy, unlocked posts are gravy, locked posts talk to me, no he will not hide his position on the map.
SURPRISE!: Run it by me if you want a character to sneak up on Long. He's pretty sharp-of-senses when he's awake. On the other hand, he drowses a LOT.
MISCELLANEOUS
probably sticking a ton of canon quotes here sooner or later. yes.
