Post by Eric Cartman on Oct 9, 2013 1:54:11 GMT
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The Basics
Name: Eric Cartman
Nickname/Other names: Cartman, Fatass
Gender: Male
Age: 23
Hometown: South Park, Colorado
Canon: South Park
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The Outside and the In
Face Claim/PB
Patrick Stump
Appearance:
Eric is used to being considered unattractive. This carries onto his life in Tenebrae, although he's honestly not bad-looking. He spent his entire life in South Park being mocked, teased, and outright shamed for being overweight, and while he'd made the effort in his teenaged years to get back into shape, he still doesn't consider himself "pretty". It's just one of his many issues, and one of the more volatile ones - he doesn't like his appearance being picked apart. Bringing up his shaggy, slightly long strawberry-brown hair is bound to cause problems, since the hair color was something he inherited from his deadbeat father. It's probably best to avoid talking about his fashion sense, too, which is firmly utilitarian and a relic of living in a place with a lot of snow. (Or he thinks there was a lot of snow. Assumes there was a lot of snow. He can't explain the six layers of clothes he arrived at Tenebrae in otherwise.) Maybe his eye color is safe? They're brown, which is fairly generic. But don't talk about the glasses. He doesn't know why he even needs them, but the Shift turned his eyesight all crappy and he will shove them down your throat if you mention them one more time, swear to God.
Eric does carry himself with an incredible amount of confidence. He walks tall, hands shoved in his pockets, and never smiles - he smirks, obviously always thinking about how to be two steps ahead of whoever he's talking to. It's obvious that Eric is supremely intelligent, even when he's sitting around eating potato chips and berating someone about their shortcomings. He has that glitter in his eyes, the kind that suggests he knows more than everyone around him. He is, however, often underestimated because of his general disheveled appearance. As mentioned above, his clothes (worn more for comfort than for style), his hair (remaining uncut because of a vague memory that might not be a memory), and his general demeanor suggest that Eric is just a lazy college student.
Personality:
The best word to describe Eric would be "toxic". It's not a great word, but it's perfect for Eric's blend of cockiness, charm, volatility, violence, and melancholy. His childhood was far from easy, and even with his selective amnesia, he can tell you endless horror stories about the constantly shifting equilibrium that is South Park, Colorado, especially as regards his single mother. He probably won't, though. He's secretive, and doesn't share information about himself easily... unless he can use that information to trip someone up and gain an upper hand on them in an argument.
Eric is extremely self-sure, and his egomania is through the roof. He's proud of the fact that he's the closest thing to a genius to ever come out of South Park, proud of his public speaking skills that got him into a good college in Denver, proud of the fact that he ripped off a good chunk of his friends in order to pay for that college education... it would be hard to find anything Eric has ever regretted doing. (And in case you were wondering, no, Eric does not regret killing his birth father. That is something he actually did. The level of insanity in his hometown is very high.) He could also write you a twenty-minute speech arguing in favor of what he did, bringing up every counter-argument against his achievements and crushing them. The very few cracks in his egocentric facade are attached to his appearance, which he's been conditioned to loathe, no matter how he might look here in Tenebrae and how it might differ from how he looked in South Park. It's a touchy subject, one that he doesn't talk positively about.
Eric does not operate in the gray areas of life - he's a person of extremes. He can get agitated about anything... at the same time, he can also decidedly and stubbornly refuse to care about anything as well. He doesn't consider his actions, but goes with his gut instinct, preferring to rationalize his behavior later, when he has time to work out the best way to convince others that his way was obviously the right way. He'll argue his point until he's blue in the face, and he will never let go of anything, because he did things correctly. Obviously.
His moral compass is fairly skewed, as one might imagine. His main concern at any given moment is himself; there used to be one or two people he would admit to caring about, and their concerns sometimes clouded his selfish thoughts. Good and evil are fairly irrelevant ideas to Eric - "good" is anything that benefits him, while "bad" is anything that doesn't. Because of that, saying Eric is a rebel is a massive understatement. He's not much for conventional law and order, and he's very good at causing petty issues and fights at Tenebrae. Eric's definitely a scrappy guy, and his brain is usually occupied with new ways to get himself answers regarding the Shift and Tenebrae.
Eric does have some amnesia associated with his past life in South Park. Certain people have just vanished from his consciousness, including one he thinks he was actually in love with; events important to his life have varying degrees of clarity associated with them. He remembers killing his birth father and his wife, but the why is totally lost on him, for instance. There are people who've been wiped clean from his memory - their appearance, their names, everything about them except the ways they affected Eric. Eric remembers everything about his sexual awakening and accepting his homosexuality, except the people who got him to that point - his ex-boyfriend, the man he loved right up until he got torn from South Park, the various townspeople whose solidarity in the face of sheer craziness pulled him through the storm. All gone. Everyone is a blank sometimes.
Bitterness is evident within Eric. He's kind of hard to put up with, especially now that his mind is struggling to put together the pieces of his past. Hardest is losing someone he loved - he knows he lost them, mentally, physically, probably for the rest of time. He might cause petty issues and fights at Tenebrae, but it's clear that they're just gearing up for a huge outpouring of anger and rage. Eric doesn't deal with loss very well, because he deserves everything.
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Right Up to that Key Moment
History:
Eric has a hard time remembering people, but somewhere deep down inside him, he knows this: he's loved Kyle Broflovski since he was nine years old.
The Cartman family was deeply dysfunctional, something everyone in South Park was well aware of. Liane Cartman was a single mother who resorted to prostitution to be able to support her son; Eric had something wrong with him mentally, something that made him vicious and violent and rotten. This level of dysfunction wasn't very uncommon in South Park, a town full of idiots, nutcases, the Devil's literal children, and Mecha-Streisand, but pretending that Eric's childhood was somehow easier for it would be a lie.
But back to Kyle. Eric had three friends, none of whom he remembers at all. First was Stan Marsh, the most average of the four of them, including being on the football team, having a long-term girlfriend then fiancee in Wendy Testaburger, and staying settled in South Park. Second was Kenny McCormick, who was not only more dysfunctional than Eric, but was plagued with some sort of mystical curse that caused him to be immortal. He did a lot of drugs to deal with the stress of it all. And third was Kyle Broflovski, who was Eric's other half, the kind of kid who presented as nice but was really just as vicious as Eric, deep down.
Kyle had his share of problems. His mother was an impulsive, hyper-vigilant bitch; his dad did not care; his brother was an infant genius who had already accomplished more by age three than Kyle would with his whole life. The stress of trying to live up to so much watchfulness and perfection ate at the kid, and Eric loved picking him apart. It was a particularly fun game, since Kyle was so tightly wound. Eventually Kyle figured out how to make Eric wind up in the same way, and it became less of a game and more of a battle of wills. And sometimes they tried to murder each other. (Normal for South Park.)
And then, when Eric was nine, Kyle got moved to San Francisco. At first, Eric was overjoyed, because he didn't have to deal with that stupid ginger kid anymore. No more arguing. No more fat jokes. No more nagging or whining or screaming or his scream-whining that sounded a bit like nails on a chalkboard or kind of bonding over Terrance and Phillip episodes or pulling on each other's hair or that funny little feeling Eric got when they kind of agreed with each other... no more anything. Eric's life seemed much emptier without Kyle. When Eric discovered that there was a fairly good chance Kyle was going to die in San Francisco, he, without so much as saying a word to Kyle about it ever, saved him and his family. At the time, he figured it was just because he was so bored without Kyle, but he didn't want to admit the truth to himself.
Oh, later he acted out. A lot. He once got the whole elementary school to think Kyle was in a gay relationship with him, when they were eleven, which was pretty amazing, even if it pissed Kyle off like crazy. Or that time Eric got Kyle to do some pretty nasty things in Imaginationland. Or... but Eric's memories of all that are pretty fuzzy. He does remember that he dated someone to make Kyle jealous in high school, but it didn't work, because the person he dated thought they were just hanging out. (That person was Eric's real best friend, Leopold Stotch. Leopold probably still thinks they were just hanging out a lot more often than usual, instead of dating.) And of course, there was always something crazy going on in South Park, and most of the time, Kyle and Eric and Stan and Kenny were just focused on getting through the crazy.
That was the de rigeur until the four of them went their own separate ways after high school - Kenny to work in the auto shop in South Park, Eric and Stan to Denver for college, and Kyle to Boulder, also for college. They didn't get to see each other very often, and when they did, they tended to go all out with their small four-man partying. They ripped on Stan for majoring in eligibility with his football scholarship, Kyle for going to law school just like his dad, how original, Kenny for doing nothing with his life, and Eric for pretending he was good at speaking with his marble-mouthed accent.
And, in hushed tones, Kenny would sometimes lean over, drunk, and mutter something particularly painful into Eric's ear.
"You ever gonna let Kyle know you're obsessed with him?"
Key Moment:
Eric was fighting with someone, someone very important to him. Eric doesn't remember who it was, just that he really cared about this person. That's rare, someone Eric cares about. It was a boy, though. That would make sense; he liked one girl once, for maybe three minutes, before remembering that it was Wendy Testaburger, queen of the hippie liberals. All the others were boys.
They were fighting, though. This might be normal. Maybe not. But it was about Eric trying to use a multiverse to meet another version of him. He wanted to see what would happen. The other boy was, predictably (predictably? Eric had to think on that. Predictably. That word came so easily...), telling him that this was a terrible idea, that he'd kill them all, that he was an idiot of the highest order, didn't you go to college to learn common sense you bigoted turd, etcetera, etcetera.
"And you went to college to what? Smoke a bowl?" Eric pointed out with a glare.
"I do not smoke, Cartman!" Everything he yelled was so shrill.
"Oh right, you were just making out with anything that moves." Eric rolled his eyes, going back to his makeshift universe-traversing machine. It was held together with tape in parts, and rubber bands. Eric did not go to school to be an engineer. Clearly.
The boy opposite him seemed to quiet at that, his eyes narrowed. Green. A flash of green or something.
"I hope you die," the other boy said.
And that's when everything went upside down.
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A Roleplaying Shift
RP Sample:
"No. No! NO NO NO NO NO NO -"
Eric's brain kept repeating the mantra, his mouth spitting it out like a broken record. That guy - that one, he had a name, and Eric loved him, and he was gone and - where the hell was he, even? - all he felt he could do was scream. His brain wasn't remembering things. He was a genius! A completely frickin' amazeballs genius, even! He finished his undergrad in three years! Suck on that, you... you...
He couldn't come up with the name of his roommate. He'd known his roommate since birth, practically, and he couldn't remember anything about him.
His screaming soon drew the attention of a few people wearing similar uniforms, looking fresh and pressed and like Stepford wives. This was straight out of The Handmaid's Tale. Maybe he'd actually gotten to a multiverse, and this was the wrong one. Maybe one of these people knew who he was... but he wasn't going to ask that. No, he had to persevere, he realized, finally cutting off his speech, lips quivering and bleary eyes staring off at the people staring back at him. They moved, fluidly, in a fog -
...no. I can't SEE, either?!
Eric did his best not to start screaming again, and succeeded. Power of will and all that. He had more control than people realized. Squinting ahead, he noticed the friendly similarly-dressed robot people coming towards him, asking him if he was all right. Before Eric could really do anything about it, he was swarmed with the blue-clad caretakers, all suffocating him with goodwill and niceties and... urgh. It made him want to vomit, then scream, then vomit some more.
"Sweetie, where are you from?" one of the women asked. Eric fixated on her, probably because she looked vaguely familiar. Somewhere in his brain, the idea of his mother bounced around, but Eric honestly couldn't remember much what she looked like. Maybe like this woman - brunette with shorter hair and a thin build. But maybe it was just the way she said "sweetie". Eric, instead of taking that as a sympathizing point, glared at her.
"The sky," Eric spat back. The woman pursed her lips, as a few of her cronies moved around Eric. Eric could feel their eyes pouring over his body, which only made him glare harder, right eye twitching. Yeah, attack the fat kid, why don't you.
"...sweetie -"
"I'm twenty-three years old," Eric corrected forcefully. No more of this sweetie business.
"...twenty-three year old." That was even worse. "Where you are, things like this... people moving from their world to this one... happen often. Taking it out on me isn't going to help."
"It might," Eric deadpanned.
She sighed. "...your name?"
"Eric," Eric said tersely. "Yours?"
"Becky," the woman responded. Eric rolled his eyes. That was such a robot housewife name. They were all totally robots.
...all sarcasm aside, though. This place was odd. Everything was perfectly manicured, from the lawns to the paint on the houses to the French tips on Becky's nails. The sun was shining and the temperature was balmy, though Eric just came from sub-zero temperatures in October in South Park. His hair should've been sticking to his face, given the heat, but it was still shaggy and fluffy as ever. The gears in Eric's mind began to turn as Becky started talking again.
"This is Tenebrae. You'll be safe here," she insisted. Insipid drivel. "We've helped many others like you feel comfortable and at home in their new surroundings, paying particular attention to adjustment and settling -"
"That's management speak," Eric noted confidently. "...I have a degree in obfuscating management speak - I mean, communications, I have a degree in business communications." The people at U of Col didn't generally like when he mocked his own career path. "And you're basically telling me I'm stuck here."
"Not stuck. Just here until a solution is reached regarding your situation."
Eric knew what that meant - he was going to die here. But Eric was smarter than to just resign himself to that. He was going to get out. He smirked a bit at Becky before pausing and pursing his lips, matching Becky's expression.
He pretended to think. "...you think maybe... I could remember more about myself if I stay here?"
"I certainly hope so, Eric. Do you have a last name?"
"Cartman." Might as well let her in on it. If she could look him up, she would find out all about his checkered past, and would beg to throw him out of her little perfect suburban utopia. "...I need to remember my past."
"I'm sure you do. And if you follow me, we can get you on that path."
Eric didn't believe that for a second. But Eric agreed to follow her and her cadre of silent goons. He wasn't going to be on that path, but this place seemed posh. Quiet. Not used to hellraisers. He could get out of here in a snap and then piece together who that man he loved was.
And why that man wished he'd die.
Member Name: Halberry
Member Age: 22
Other Characters: none
Tell us a Little About Yourself!: Been writing for a long time, and looking forward to writing with everyone!
