Insomnium: Gabriel Weiland

BASIC DEMOGRAPHICS

Name: Gabriel Weiland
Age: 15
Gender: male
Species: human
Languages: English, Mandarin, Japanese, German, Russian, Hindi, Latin, Arabic, Yiddish.  (Others that he has not achieved fluency in yet.  The Latin allows him passing understanding of most romance european languages, like French, Spanish, and Portuguese.)


APPEARANCE

Height: 5’11”
Weight: On the light side of average.
Build: Slender, angular and leggy, Gabriel has enough muscle tone to suggest that he is fit and active, but not enough to imply that he is by any means a rigorous athlete.
Skin: Pale and unblemished.
Hair: Pale blond, just a little too gold to be ashen.  It is worn on the long side of short, expertly groomed.  He has natural curls, and his hair is cut to maximise the manageability and attractive fall of them.
Eyes: Innocently wide at time, calculatingly shrewd at others, either way a beautiful medium to pale blue.
Other traits: From a distance, Gabriel tends to look taller than he is, precisely because he is so leggy and slender.
Clothes: A dark blue tailcoat and tight well-tailored tan pants in a semi-victorian fashion. His shirt is white and his vest and tall boots are black, but his ascot is cream to match his pants.


PHYSICALITY

Demeanor:  Gabriel holds himself like all the universe is watching him with their most expectant and critical eyes.  Because they are.  His posture is never slouched, his table manners are always perfect, and he always holds the door for his elders and ladies.  If you are really looking, you can tell he has been trained in a martial art (jujutsu).  But then, he has also been trained in ballroom dancing.
Speech patterns: Gabriel is very formal and polite in his speech and almost never uses contractions unless he is speaking with very close personal friends in very private settings.  Because he was taught so very many languages from such a young age, he does not speak any of them with a recognizable accent or dialect.  Because of this lack of accentuation, even though he is technically perfect, his speech can sound ever so slightly off compared to a fluent native speaker.  (Strictly speaking, his native dialect language is Eden: Universal.  Which is about 2000 years removed from modern High British.  It is reasonable to assume that all the languages he knows have "shifted" due to time, and he would have as easy a time understanding us as we would Chaucer, in a Real)


PERSONALITY

Overview: The heir to the galaxy's largest corporation- and privately held estate and fortune- who has recently discovered that everyone he knows, including his own dear father, might be certifiably nuts.
Passions:  Gabriel loves music.  He has a deep fondness for all the cultural arts, and will geek out about linguistics, or finances to a point that most people would consider boring (and Adrianna considers "cute") but if you want to see him truly captivated, you turn on music. (If you want to see him enraptured, you ask Adrianna to sing.) Gabriel's second, and though he doesn't know it yet, probably biggest passion is Adrianna Honne.
Fears: Gabriel was previously only afraid of disappointing his father and proving unable to take over as CEO of Weiland Enterprizes.  In light of new information regarding his father's past, those fears have changed slightly.  Now he is honestly afraid that his father might kill him if he fails.  He is also rather afraid that he and Adrianna might actually be half, if not whole siblings.  Frankly, he is also afraid of most of the Morgaines he knows.  Specifically Eff, and the possibility of encountering Eff without his wife there to keep him from blowing everything up.
Strengths: Gabriel is a very organized and determined person.  When he has set his mind on a goal, he is good at finding the resources and means to see that goal to an end, whether he is the one who personally accomplishes the steps or not.  He knows how to plan, how to delegate, how to budget and negotiate.  He knows how and when to compromise and when not to.  A good business mind.  He is also very caring and compassionate, and tries to find solutions that lead to the most people’s happiness whenever possible.  Knowing that people are depending on him just makes him more determined not to fail.  Physically, he can kick a man in the head, and he has at least had experience sparring people who know how to actually fight.
Weaknesses: Gabriel might have learned academically how to fight, but he has never had to fight for any reason other than physical fitness and a means of playing with his friends, so he has no real combat instinct, and has not conditioned himself with the stamina to actually fight.  He can fight, but he will not.  He also honestly does not understand the mindset of people who deliberately seek to do harm to others, and will be thrown off or derailed when encountering rhetoric that has a distinctly aggressive for the sake of aggression bent to it.  While he does talk a good talk, he is young, and is accustomed to deferring to his father’s expertise.  This insecurity before expertise and authority will have him caving to some more forceful opinions, and he has never honestly dealt with real bullying before.  Likewise he has never been honestly attacked with the intent to truly harm him.
Quirks:
1)  He can be strangely, almost mechanically precise in going through familiar motions and habits.  He picked this up from his dad.
2)  He will sometimes whistle to himself and stare into space.  He doesn’t ever say what he’s thinking about when he does this, but he seems happy.
3)  He always refers to people with an honorific before their name, even if he has been invited not to, until he feels comfortable or close enough to be informal with them.
4)  He is just shy enough to be uncomfortable when someone he is not on a voluntary first name basis with is intruding on his personal space, or seems interested in him in ways other than professional.  He is good about not stammering or blushing, but the occasional one will slip out, depending on the degree of unease.


HISTORY

Dream: Gabriel has mostly lucid dreams so far as clarity and coherence, but with occasional surreal elements and transitions. Usually, his dreams are set in his house, which is an obscenely expensive palace in the relative style of Ludwig of Bavaria, or on the Emerald Ixia, the space ship his two best friends live on.  He also has an undefined space of physical vagueness where he imagines himself interacting with the Morgain siblings, most of whom he has only met online.
Homeworld: Gabriel was born on Eden, the second of the six terraformed planets and 20 habitable moons of the Destination Galaxy, on January 4th, 2524 PE (Post Exodus).  He was born shortly after the Second Galactic War.  And Weiland Enterprises, which he is being groomed to take over the ownership of, is a key figure in the reconstruction and relief of affected areas.  Such things as spacefaring, nanotechnology, cybernetic restructuring, and fashion genetics are commonplace.  Aliens are not.  In fact, no one has ever seen one.  But there continue to be members of the human race who insist we can’t be alone in the universe.  Earth is a distant memory, and no one currently alive has ever been to or seen it, but the History of Old Earth is still a subject taught and studied with cultural interest.

Family/Friends: The most important and influential figure in Gabriel’s life is his father, Johnathan Weiland.  The second most is his recently deceased stepfather-figure, Robin Goodfellow.  He never knew his mother, since she died when he was born.  but he wears her engagement and wedding bands on a necklace, and intends to use them to propose the the woman he will one day marry.

After that is the Duncan-Honne family.  “Aunt” Annie Duncan is a friend of his fathers’, and she runs a cargo ship with her not-husband partner Aiden Honne.  Gabriel is good friends with Annie’s kids, Westly Duncan and Adrianna Honne.

Through Aunt Annie he also knows Westley’s dad’s family, the large (and telepathic) Morgaine clan.  The ones he’s had the most contact with are Yousef and Grace Morgaine, And Cat Breen, and their 12 children.  They are all brilliant, and one of the middle boys, Darien (son of Cat and Ecclesiastes Morgaine), is a skilled musician.  He views the other boy as somewhat of a rival for Adrianna’s attention.  Darien is the one who nicknamed Adrianna “sparrow” for her singing voice. The two he has met personally are Jacob Morgain, the oldest son of Eff and Grace, and Mikhale Morgaine, the son of Exodus and Ecclesiastes, by Cat.

History: Gabriel grew up a perfectly happy child with a very loving father and very loving adoptive family and wonderful friends.  He was accomplished in school and everything in his life seemed perfectly normal and happy, with most of his days spent at home, either with his teachers and his father, or learning the trade, and treasured vacations to visit his friends on their ship.

Then, when he was 14, his father’s beloved Robin died under very strange circumstances.  That same day, there were news reports of the long elusive bounty, “Puck” being taken down after nearly 30 years at large.  Followed by reports of the grisly murders of the five Bounty Hunters who had taken the infamous assassin down.  The hunters’ hearts had been ripped from their bodies.  The hearts were discovered piled on the mortuary gurney where Puck’s body had been awaiting autopsy, with the prevailing theory that Puck’s longtime partner in assassination, the long missing and presumed dead “Wolf”, had taken revenge for his death.

The whereabouts of Puck’s body continue to be unknown, but that night, Gabriel could not reach his father at all.  In the morning, Adrianna rang at the front gate, saying she had come to retrieve her mother.  Confused, he searched the house with her until they found their parents sleeping snuggled up on a couch in Robin’s room with the TV left running and several empty bottles of alcohol around.

Later that morning, Johnathan held Robin’s funeral.  Gabriel was worried about his father, because Robin had been his friend, lover, and companion for as long as Gabriel could remember, but he seemed to be taking things surprisingly well.

A few months later, when searching his father’s office for his computer, to retrieve files on a business case they were working on, Gabriel happened to open a beautifully inlaid mahogany and mother of pearl box sitting on his father’s desk, thinking the pen-sized computer might be inside.  What he found shattered his world.

The box contained over two dozen fired .45 pistol rounds.  Even a whole barretta clip of unfired bullets.  But beyond that... there was a lock of familiar looking rusty red-brown hair, curled up and tied with a scrap of green flannel.  Flannel that looked like it carried a blood stain.  There was an old, worn videocube.  And the last thing, maybe the strangest thing, was a ring.  Carved like a Victoria rocket ship wrapped around the finger, sleek and ornate, with three large perfect rubies forming a stylised contrail from the engine amidst a scattering of diamond chips.  The words “Marry me” were carved on the inside of the band in an ornate script.

An engagement ring... a very specific space themed engagement ring, in a box that contained a lock of Aunt Annie’s hair.  And a clip from her gun.  And... bullets she had fired?  The idea that his father would have any of the things assembled here, much less all of them, snapped the fragile bubble of his reality.  Watching the video cube, even part way, only nailed the final lid in the coffin.  He had seen his father spar with Aunt Annie as a friend.  But to fight her like that?  Like he meant to kill her?  A lifetime of scattered hints and brushed aside questions came crashing down in a flurry of holographic bullets.

Then Gabriel shut off the videocube, carefully closed the box, and went in search of his father’s liquor cabinet.  As he sat there drinking, his idle thoughts kept pulling up web-searches.  The Wolf bounty, and associated footage.  Dates and circumstances of Aunt Annie’s hospitalisations.  The fact that she had lost her arm before the war...

Sleeping:  Gabriel is draped across an overstuffed chair in his father’s study, still dresses in his clothes for the day, though he has loosened his ascot and unbuttoned part of his shirt, because it started to get hot.  The bottle has fallen out of his hand.

SKILLS

Primary Skills: Gabriel is a businessman and an aristocrat.  He can balance the budgets of multiple million dollar companies, both annually and quarterly, while keeping track of their individual production ratios, needs, cultures, and President’s daughter’s birthdays.  He is also an excellent dancer, and his penmanship is superb.
Combat: Not really.  He would much rather negotiate.  But if someone or something keeps attacking him, he will defend himself and his jujutsu training will come back to him.  Just... very slowly due to his innate pacifism.
Weapons/Gear: There is a cellphone and a netlink processor built into his brain.  Which doesn’t really matter in Insomnium, but in his Real, he places and receives phone calls, and can search the internet, wherever he can access a signal.  It is a browsing interface, rather than a cloud function, so he is not at risk of having viruses downloaded (he could not download anything to his brain even if he wanted to), or having his otherwise organic brain “hacked” in any way.  There is also a pocket watch in his vest pocket.
Unusual Abilities: Nope.  Not unless you count learning languages and paying attention.