How about a shave?

I've noticed, after flipping through Hejduk's books yesterday that his characters are slightly strange. I did assume that they would be, but not all of them. Especially my character, the Botanist.

When I first saw how people were creating their characters, I noticed a darker side of them coming through, almost immediately. Josh Budarick's police of chief is a complete embodiment of evil, for example. I felt as if I needed an eccentric but less "noir" or "macabre" character, even though I love the genre of it all.

Hejduk has something different to say about my botanist (it should be his botanist but he is mine now :P). The man really isn't obsessced with plants at all, hes completely determined to catch praying mantises and lady bugs.
This is the excerpt from one of the books.
"The Botanist collects plants primarily to attract praying mantises and ladybugs. The preoccupation with the mantis dates back to his days in cateshism classes, and he was constantly warned not to kill one. They had a sacredness about them. He disliked their colour. One afternoon he witnessed a mantis devouring another insect. He held a magnifying glass to the head of the mantis (not to kill it with the sun). He was appaled at its ferocity. He wanted to kill it on the spot. Later that evening the mantis alighted on the pages of his prayer book. He closed it and knew he had commited a sin. That night he decided to become a botanist.

His mother told him ladybugs were good luck, and that he should treat them with kindness. He carefully places them in a jar and spends hours counting the black spots on their backs.

His mistress wears a ceil of dead ladybugs and a cloak of matis wings."

He is a slightly derranged man out on a mission to kill mantises. It reminds me a bit of sweeney todd, most of the characters have an air of Tim Burton to them. They all seem to have something a bit wrong with them. I remeber noticing the lightning man, who collects lightning rods. He went insane and a massive rampage through the town throwing lightning rods into peoples thatch rooves, setting them on fire. Yet another link to someone insane, Sean has named one of our assignments Equus. If anyone has read or seen the play Equus, they will know its about an insane boy who loves/worships horses, and removed their eyes one night.

The insanity is all falling into place. Even though its nowhere near realistic, its fun, like tim burtons characters. Who would think the barber killed people and put them in pies. Who would think the botanist collected ladybugs and counted their spots, with his wife wearing dead insects as apparel. If anything what the character's kill and dont kill, or the derranged ideas they have will affect the architecture incredibly. I know I deffinately need a humoungous hall lined with shelves of ladybugs, and a sacreligious temple to the slaughter of praying mantises. My character description obviously needs to change, and so does the images.



Sweeny Todd had me thinking about how dangerous it was to shave the next time I had a razor on my chin. How big is your local florist's closet, filled with skeletons.

Images

Professor Petras Machzulias the retired botanist

Petras is a scientist more than anything. He loves them past the point of a hobby gardener. Petras’ home is where he works. His obsessing over it has lead to it being his work more than his home. A conservatory for all his rare discovaries, a personal library containing all the literature needed for the categorization and research into his field. A small collection of his own work into the morphology and form of plants can be found there too. Its hard to describe Petras without looking at his science. He is orderly and precise. Although getting into the last quarter of his life, he is still strong at heart and mind. One would compare him to an oak, stubborn and unmovable, but warm and sheltering. Being a teacher of Botany he works with many young scientists, allowing them into his life. He sees them like saplings; he sees most of the world like a plant. He feels the need to nourish and support them as they blossom and grow. He not only applies science to plants, but to his relationships as well. The people he knows well enough have their own text written about them in his library, and he watches society as if it were a colony of plants working in a single ecosystem.

Being of an older age he finds himself anchored to his home, like an oak. He’s very much a traditionalist and refuses to use modern technology to aid him in his work. Old technology was reliable, and allowed a feel of achievement to it. It took Petras many years to collect all his books, they were a strong goal in his life, and he sees each one as a trophy of his achievements.

Although some may see Petras as bland, he likes to think he has a small element of colour. Hidden out of public view is his laboratory, where many poisonous and strange concoctions are created. Just like his library, lining the walls are vials of dangerous extracts combinations. He doesn’t want anything malicious done with them, but he finds the hobby eccentric and fun, but also important, as he is working with the plants he has studied all his life.

Petras is short, but stocky, standing at 5ft. His hair has completely fallen out apart from his white bushy eyebrows that seem to sprout out from his dark rimmed glasses. The life of expeditions into forieign lands to find the rarest of plants has worn his face. Almost branch like wrinkles sprout out of the center of his face, and all collect on his wizened jaw. He regularly wears his custom made bright white lab coat, he hated the usual ones, and they dragged along the ground. An unusual site for a scientist, he wears a tool belt, a rather large leather one, with excessive amounts of tools and measuring devices, yet another collective habit he has delved into.