Post by MetallicSweet on Nov 30, 2009 9:19:46 GMT -5
Name: Francis Bonnefoy
Country of Origin: Bordeaux, France (Aquitaine Region)
Age: 28
Affiliation: Italian Mafia
Expertise: Information gathering and strategy-based operations. Francis is the sort of person who works out of the visible lens, holding a candle up to the darkness and able to decifer difficult puzzles quickly and concisely. A master of disguise and deception, Francis is able to speak French, English, and Italian fluently and German and Spanish with only some difficulty. He is also an extremely good interrogator, able to pick apart lies and emotions deftly.
Personality:
Outwardly, Francis appears to be relatively easy-going, quite intelligent, and somewhat scatterbrained. He loves to read the newspaper with breakfast coffee and wax philosophical about the state of humanity over a glass of fine wine. He doesn't drive a car even though he has a license mostly because he forgets where he put the car keys and is apt, thus, to loose them altogether. On the other hand, he does own a motorbike and has a number of replacement keys in his apartment. He loves to teach things to other people if they ask, and he likes to be able to dote on small children and cute animals. He gets along well with most people and enjoys parties for the socializing more than anything else.
Beneath his beguiling outward persona, Francis is not quite as easy-going and definitely not scatterbrained. He's intelligent to the point of photographic memory and is intensely introverted in his patterns of thought. Even though he gets along with most, he keeps even close friends at a certain distance, and only trusts a few people with a few sides of himself. He's rather like a multidimentional polygon that any one person can only ever see one or two surfaces of. While he can figure out someone's emotions and worries within a couple of minutes of talking to them, Francis is hard-pressed to figure out himself or his motivations beyond the basics.
Appearance:
Francis is, to put it bluntly, attractive, and he knows it just as he knows that his eyes are a striking, pure blue. Just a centimeter below six feet in height, his build is lithe and highly flexible, much like that of a professional dancer. His golden blond hair is thick and he normally wears it loose at shoulder-length or tied back with a ribbon if he's working. He isn't a really imposing figure, a bit feminine, really, but his hands are extremely strong. He's a fashionable dresser and likes a bit of flair when out in public.
Strengths:
Francis is very level-headed and able to look at both the big picture and minute details almost simultaneously. He doesn't take criticism personally unless it is meant to be so and can diffuse tension in a room with ease. He appears to be self-confidence and a bit of a flirt, but he does know when to back off. He isn't a hard drinker and does not enjoy being drunk. His memory is such that he can remember all needed information down to the last detail, including what x-person involved with y-project ate three weeks ago for lunch and what was in that dish and if x-person enjoyed it. He will remember what someone is afraid of or allergic to and every detail even if it seems irrelevant at the time of discovering it.
Weaknesses:
The main problem with Francis is that, once someone starts to think they know him, it becomes more and more apparent how little a person can know about Francis. Francis has extremely high standards for everyone around him, but these standards are nothing like the ones he sets for himself. Thus, most people who would say they are close to Francis can never be sure if they are, and that makes him extremely difficult to trust. He'll always get the job done to the very best of his ability, but the means by which this occurs does not always follow an obviously logical progression. He may or may not respect all icons of authority if he feels their current decisions are incompetent. And, while Francis has almost no temper to speak of, if he decides that something or someone is jeopardizing the success of a job, he will remove such a factor without hesistation.
Likes:
--Rain and fresh air
--Unfiltered French cigarettes
--French wine and cuisine
--Dancing, partnered and solo
--Romance and adventure comics and novels
--Things that he considers beautiful (i.e. roses)
Dislikes:
--Industrial smells and chemicals
--American cigarettes
--American and English alcohol and cuisine; also, beer
--Boring conversations
--Mindless smut and off-key singing
--Things that he considers ugly (i.e. the world)
Quirks:
When excited, Francis will sometimes jump over logical steps in an explanation as his mind moves faster than his mouth can, especially if he's speaking in a language other than French. He gesticulates at lot with his entire body when explaining things or describing someonthing interesting, making an explanation of how to make a Christmas Yule log look something like an interpretative dance.
Francis tends to ignore people's genders when giving gifts or compliments. He might tell a lady she would look lovely in a particular men's suit design by so-and-so or a man that he would definitely benefit from a bit of rouge or concealer.
Francis's main hobby outside of work is collecting French and Italian romance and adventure novels and comics. Thus, his apartment is filled with them, all neatly in book cases and stored in boxes. He also makes his own shoes, imitating highly coveted designs down to the smallest detail.
Phobias:
Francis absolutely cannot stand badly prepared food. He won't eat it, won't be seen with it, and will altogether throw a fit if it's presented to him. He will remember who served it to him, who cooked it, and he will get them very quickly, very cleanly, and very mercilessly.
Francis is also afraid of mustard. It's okay if it's just mustard seeds, but if he can smell or see it, he won't go anywhere near it.
History:
Francis was born the second son of an old Bordeaux winery family and spent the first ten years of his life in the care of his grandparents there. He was sent for the forwarding of his education to Paris where he attended an all-boy's school specializing in military history and strategy as well as languages. At the age of sixteen, Francis graduated and completed early officer entrance into the French Armed Forces whilst he completed a interdisciplinary degree in chemistry and philosophy at the Unversity of Paris.
Francis doesn't talk much about his own past, rather about other people's pasts. He likes to describe the people he worked under in the three military campaigns that he was engaged in during his time in the French Armed Forces rather than to talk about what he himself did. He spent some time in Germany and then some time along the French-Italian border, but, perhaps most tellingly, he spent two full years overseas in combat operations in a place he cannot talk about for French security reasons. It was after this operation that he was honorably discharged due to unpredicted circumstances and then came to America.
He ended up in the mafia mostly because the structure resembled the life back in the military that he was used to: a sustained heirarchy of positions and clear definition of purposes. He just sort of fell into the job without much effort on his part, by talking to people and giving suggestions as was his habit, and, eventually, he ended up helping to orchestrate a bank robbery without really knowing who the larger factor was behind it. He had expected a larger player because those actually pulling the heist weren't very smart, and the mafia seemed logical in the current state of American society and politics. Francis doesn't feel any particular qualms about working for the mafia; they pay him well for his services, and he generally meets interesting people.
Currently, Francis lives quite nicely, floating from party to coffee shop and often slipping into stores to browse through the constantly changing wares. He sometimes finds himself wishing for Bordeaux and the winery of his childhood, but he supposes that's probably simply nostalgia for something that he can no longer have. After all, he is the second son, and his elder brother was always better at wine-making than he.
Sample/Character Introduction:
Three blocks from his apartment, past a sharp turn on 23rd Street and 4th Avenue, there is a narrow staircase that leads up to three rooms with smooth, polished wood floors. The rooms are lined by mirrors on two sides, and there is a bar on the wall at waist height on the back wall of each room.
Francis goes there every Wednesday lunch and Sunday morning, only a pair of battered toe shoes or a worn pair of leather dance slippers in his briefcase or shoulder bag to indicate his destination. He opens up the locked studio with a key, goes to the room at the back and strips out of his clothes, leaving only his pants and belt if needed. He hums out the music to accompany himself, warming up at the bar before spinning out over the empty room, watching himself move in the mirrors. Sometimes, if he's in the mood, he sings under his breath as he dances, too.
He always slips from the studio, redresses, and locks it up before anyone else comes and after exactly two and a half hours. Sometimes, if he had been practicing particularly vigorously, his feet hurt something awful and he has to go sit down at a café nearby for a bit, have a coffee and a smoke and rest. He breathes in through the cigarette, blows up to the sky like a kiss.
Today was such a day, and Francis eased himself gratefully into the wicker chair outside of the tiny café, lighting up and gazing up at the Sunday sky. It's blue today, a little bit of a rare occurance in the city, and that made Francis smile. The waitress jumped a little at the sudden smile, rattling the coffee on the saucer but not spilling it. She sat it down before hurries back into the café, flushed in the face.
Francis watched after her for a moment before looking back up at the sky. He breathed in slowly and smelld the city, his cigarette and coffee, a little bit of cinnamon from the bakery. Francis breathed out, a soft stream of white smoke from his lips.
I wonder when they'll have a new job for me, he pondered as he took a sip of coffee. I hope it's interesting... I wonder if the new issue of Intimate Love is out yet. Maybe I should go by the bookshop? Oh, I do need a new pen, and probably I should order new toe shoes... I feel like painting. I hope my next job is interesting; I'd hate to have to make it so...
Country of Origin: Bordeaux, France (Aquitaine Region)
Age: 28
Affiliation: Italian Mafia
Expertise: Information gathering and strategy-based operations. Francis is the sort of person who works out of the visible lens, holding a candle up to the darkness and able to decifer difficult puzzles quickly and concisely. A master of disguise and deception, Francis is able to speak French, English, and Italian fluently and German and Spanish with only some difficulty. He is also an extremely good interrogator, able to pick apart lies and emotions deftly.
Personality:
"When I was a child, I spake as a child,
I understood as a child, I thought as a child:
but when I became a man, I put away childish things."
- 1 Corinthians 13:11
I understood as a child, I thought as a child:
but when I became a man, I put away childish things."
- 1 Corinthians 13:11
Outwardly, Francis appears to be relatively easy-going, quite intelligent, and somewhat scatterbrained. He loves to read the newspaper with breakfast coffee and wax philosophical about the state of humanity over a glass of fine wine. He doesn't drive a car even though he has a license mostly because he forgets where he put the car keys and is apt, thus, to loose them altogether. On the other hand, he does own a motorbike and has a number of replacement keys in his apartment. He loves to teach things to other people if they ask, and he likes to be able to dote on small children and cute animals. He gets along well with most people and enjoys parties for the socializing more than anything else.
Beneath his beguiling outward persona, Francis is not quite as easy-going and definitely not scatterbrained. He's intelligent to the point of photographic memory and is intensely introverted in his patterns of thought. Even though he gets along with most, he keeps even close friends at a certain distance, and only trusts a few people with a few sides of himself. He's rather like a multidimentional polygon that any one person can only ever see one or two surfaces of. While he can figure out someone's emotions and worries within a couple of minutes of talking to them, Francis is hard-pressed to figure out himself or his motivations beyond the basics.
Appearance:
Francis is, to put it bluntly, attractive, and he knows it just as he knows that his eyes are a striking, pure blue. Just a centimeter below six feet in height, his build is lithe and highly flexible, much like that of a professional dancer. His golden blond hair is thick and he normally wears it loose at shoulder-length or tied back with a ribbon if he's working. He isn't a really imposing figure, a bit feminine, really, but his hands are extremely strong. He's a fashionable dresser and likes a bit of flair when out in public.
Strengths:
Francis is very level-headed and able to look at both the big picture and minute details almost simultaneously. He doesn't take criticism personally unless it is meant to be so and can diffuse tension in a room with ease. He appears to be self-confidence and a bit of a flirt, but he does know when to back off. He isn't a hard drinker and does not enjoy being drunk. His memory is such that he can remember all needed information down to the last detail, including what x-person involved with y-project ate three weeks ago for lunch and what was in that dish and if x-person enjoyed it. He will remember what someone is afraid of or allergic to and every detail even if it seems irrelevant at the time of discovering it.
Weaknesses:
The main problem with Francis is that, once someone starts to think they know him, it becomes more and more apparent how little a person can know about Francis. Francis has extremely high standards for everyone around him, but these standards are nothing like the ones he sets for himself. Thus, most people who would say they are close to Francis can never be sure if they are, and that makes him extremely difficult to trust. He'll always get the job done to the very best of his ability, but the means by which this occurs does not always follow an obviously logical progression. He may or may not respect all icons of authority if he feels their current decisions are incompetent. And, while Francis has almost no temper to speak of, if he decides that something or someone is jeopardizing the success of a job, he will remove such a factor without hesistation.
Likes:
--Rain and fresh air
--Unfiltered French cigarettes
--French wine and cuisine
--Dancing, partnered and solo
--Romance and adventure comics and novels
--Things that he considers beautiful (i.e. roses)
Dislikes:
--Industrial smells and chemicals
--American cigarettes
--American and English alcohol and cuisine; also, beer
--Boring conversations
--Mindless smut and off-key singing
--Things that he considers ugly (i.e. the world)
Quirks:
When excited, Francis will sometimes jump over logical steps in an explanation as his mind moves faster than his mouth can, especially if he's speaking in a language other than French. He gesticulates at lot with his entire body when explaining things or describing someonthing interesting, making an explanation of how to make a Christmas Yule log look something like an interpretative dance.
Francis tends to ignore people's genders when giving gifts or compliments. He might tell a lady she would look lovely in a particular men's suit design by so-and-so or a man that he would definitely benefit from a bit of rouge or concealer.
Francis's main hobby outside of work is collecting French and Italian romance and adventure novels and comics. Thus, his apartment is filled with them, all neatly in book cases and stored in boxes. He also makes his own shoes, imitating highly coveted designs down to the smallest detail.
Phobias:
Francis absolutely cannot stand badly prepared food. He won't eat it, won't be seen with it, and will altogether throw a fit if it's presented to him. He will remember who served it to him, who cooked it, and he will get them very quickly, very cleanly, and very mercilessly.
Francis is also afraid of mustard. It's okay if it's just mustard seeds, but if he can smell or see it, he won't go anywhere near it.
History:
"In war, there are no unwounded soldiers."
- José Narosky
- José Narosky
Francis was born the second son of an old Bordeaux winery family and spent the first ten years of his life in the care of his grandparents there. He was sent for the forwarding of his education to Paris where he attended an all-boy's school specializing in military history and strategy as well as languages. At the age of sixteen, Francis graduated and completed early officer entrance into the French Armed Forces whilst he completed a interdisciplinary degree in chemistry and philosophy at the Unversity of Paris.
Francis doesn't talk much about his own past, rather about other people's pasts. He likes to describe the people he worked under in the three military campaigns that he was engaged in during his time in the French Armed Forces rather than to talk about what he himself did. He spent some time in Germany and then some time along the French-Italian border, but, perhaps most tellingly, he spent two full years overseas in combat operations in a place he cannot talk about for French security reasons. It was after this operation that he was honorably discharged due to unpredicted circumstances and then came to America.
He ended up in the mafia mostly because the structure resembled the life back in the military that he was used to: a sustained heirarchy of positions and clear definition of purposes. He just sort of fell into the job without much effort on his part, by talking to people and giving suggestions as was his habit, and, eventually, he ended up helping to orchestrate a bank robbery without really knowing who the larger factor was behind it. He had expected a larger player because those actually pulling the heist weren't very smart, and the mafia seemed logical in the current state of American society and politics. Francis doesn't feel any particular qualms about working for the mafia; they pay him well for his services, and he generally meets interesting people.
Currently, Francis lives quite nicely, floating from party to coffee shop and often slipping into stores to browse through the constantly changing wares. He sometimes finds himself wishing for Bordeaux and the winery of his childhood, but he supposes that's probably simply nostalgia for something that he can no longer have. After all, he is the second son, and his elder brother was always better at wine-making than he.
Sample/Character Introduction:
"One says: We're being flooded.
---That's better then, it'll be over faster."
- Pierre Jean Jouves, Les Enterrés
---That's better then, it'll be over faster."
- Pierre Jean Jouves, Les Enterrés
Three blocks from his apartment, past a sharp turn on 23rd Street and 4th Avenue, there is a narrow staircase that leads up to three rooms with smooth, polished wood floors. The rooms are lined by mirrors on two sides, and there is a bar on the wall at waist height on the back wall of each room.
Francis goes there every Wednesday lunch and Sunday morning, only a pair of battered toe shoes or a worn pair of leather dance slippers in his briefcase or shoulder bag to indicate his destination. He opens up the locked studio with a key, goes to the room at the back and strips out of his clothes, leaving only his pants and belt if needed. He hums out the music to accompany himself, warming up at the bar before spinning out over the empty room, watching himself move in the mirrors. Sometimes, if he's in the mood, he sings under his breath as he dances, too.
He always slips from the studio, redresses, and locks it up before anyone else comes and after exactly two and a half hours. Sometimes, if he had been practicing particularly vigorously, his feet hurt something awful and he has to go sit down at a café nearby for a bit, have a coffee and a smoke and rest. He breathes in through the cigarette, blows up to the sky like a kiss.
Today was such a day, and Francis eased himself gratefully into the wicker chair outside of the tiny café, lighting up and gazing up at the Sunday sky. It's blue today, a little bit of a rare occurance in the city, and that made Francis smile. The waitress jumped a little at the sudden smile, rattling the coffee on the saucer but not spilling it. She sat it down before hurries back into the café, flushed in the face.
Francis watched after her for a moment before looking back up at the sky. He breathed in slowly and smelld the city, his cigarette and coffee, a little bit of cinnamon from the bakery. Francis breathed out, a soft stream of white smoke from his lips.
I wonder when they'll have a new job for me, he pondered as he took a sip of coffee. I hope it's interesting... I wonder if the new issue of Intimate Love is out yet. Maybe I should go by the bookshop? Oh, I do need a new pen, and probably I should order new toe shoes... I feel like painting. I hope my next job is interesting; I'd hate to have to make it so...
I <3 Hetalia~
