juncture app.

[sunaugeia]

▲ Out of Character Information

Name: Orla
Username: comptometress
Current characters in Juncture: N/A

▲ In-Character Information

Character Name: Sherlock Holmes
Username: sunaugeia
OC, Canon, or AU: Canon
Played By: Benadryl Cucumberpatch
Concept: Genius detective with an addiction to danger and a mind like a racing engine.

▲ Physical Description

Sherlock stands at six foot even, and—through virtue of ‘a good coat and a short friend’, as well as a distinctly imposing posture and persona—seems taller. With pale skin and eyes, a mop of curly dark hair and a habit of dressing exclusively in dark colours with sharp lines, he often rather resembles a crow mixed with a grumpier crow. Except somewhat more dashing. The general impression he gives is one of sharpness—literal sharpness, rather than just being well-dressed. Though his clothing is expensive, his rather rumpled air (not entirely artful, though he does intentionally leave his shirt buttons open) is more Byronic than smart.

▲ History

WARNINGS for substance abuse.

Sherlock Vernet Holmes was born on the 6th January, 1977, the second Holmes son. His mother can best be characterised as ‘exhausted’. After struggling to bring up one genius child, she was at first delighted to have a son who seemed more responsive than Mycroft ever was (Mycroft being very removed and prone to long silences even from infancy, which Mrs Holmes found deeply unnerving). However, as Sherlock quickly proved to be Mycroft’s complete opposite in terms of personality—ever-squalling, needing constant and very specific attention—with all the hallmarks of a genius of his own, their mother quickly felt completely overwhelmed. Their father, for his part, was simply removed, carrying on a series of affairs and trying to extricate himself from family life without ever having to go through the hassle of divorce or separation.

Seven years Sherlock’s senior, and wise beyond his years but nonetheless a child, Mycroft took on the responsibility for Sherlock’s upbringing very early in both their lives. During Sherlock’s childhood, they were incredibly close. By the time Sherlock was four, it was already very clear (much as it had been for Mycroft) that school wouldn’t suit him, and so he was educated by a small fleet of ever-changing tutors, and with Mycroft as his primary care-giver. Sherlock was extraordinarily sheltered as a child, rarely leaving the bounds of the gardens.

At the age of perhaps ten, the case of Carl Powers arose in the news. A boy had apparently had a seizure in a swimming pool and died. It was considered a tragic accident, but Sherlock latched onto the fact that his shoes were missing from his locker in the swimming pool, and tried to call the police about it. He was, of course, brushed off. This started a habit of trying to contact the police with clues; at first, he was considered by most of the officers he came in contact with to be fairly cute and precocious, then he was worrying, then he was a nuisance, and finally when he was old enough he would be pulled in for questioning under suspicion of actually having committed the crime, but that would be long after Carl Powers.

When Sherlock was eleven and Mycroft was eighteen, Mycroft went to university and Sherlock was packed off to boarding school. Which was horrible. Sherlock viewed Mycroft leaving as an abandonment, though in fact the true ‘betrayal’ came later, when Mycroft started to (apparently) fit into normal society and climb the ranks of the civil service, happy to work behind the scenes and, in Sherlock’s mind, betray both Sherlock and himself. As children, Sherlock had viewed their relationship very much as ‘you and me against the world’, and Mycroft was now beginning to become part of said world, while Sherlock grew into more and more vitriolic opposition of it.

He went through five different boarding schools before he finally left education at the age of sixteen, with his mental state volleying between depression of the sort which refused to let him leave his bed and a kind of anxious mania. This was mainly the fault of both Sherlock’s brain chemistry and his reaction to feeling as if he were losing control of his life. Removal from a rigid schedule and disciplinary routine helped. So did copious amounts of Valium, a solution he had been toying with throughout his school years but which, when recuperating at home, was much easier to engage in, due to his mother’s dependence on the same drug.

Finally, at the age of eighteen, he returned to do his A-Levels and upped sticks for Cambridge, studying in the Natural Sciences tripos. At first he revelled in the independence, and actually Got Involved, picking up boxing, judo and fencing. There, however, the same problems arose; he felt like he was being closed-in-on. More than that, there was also the nagging issue of loneliness, a problem which had plagued the entirety of his life but which he was only just beginning to understand wasn’t his default setting. His experiences in trying to reach out to people, however, only solidified his belief that he was impossible to understand and that it was impossible for him to understand other people, too. (The fact that Mycroft, at this point, was continuing to live a separate life which Sherlock now found incomprehensible and distant, only compounded the fact).

He began experimenting with drugs beyond Valium, though depressants remained, for the time being, his first love. In the stressful environment of university and ‘adult life’, he suddenly wanted nothing more than to give in to oblivion. With his repeated phone calls to the police regarding crimes in the news coming to nothing but a threat of legal action if he continued to waste police time, he felt like he was lightyears away from living the life he wanted to live. In his second year at Cambridge, after repeatedly neglecting his studies, being inappropriately drunk (and high, though the question of drugs was carefully left unasked) and more than once causing serious property damage, he was sent down and/or left. (It was a ‘you can’t fire me, I quit’ scenario in the Dean’s office).

He returned to London, and with the help of heroin, gave up. He began drifting around the city, supported by Mycroft’s money; he stopped trying to contact the Met, even stopped reading the news to watch for murders, and generally ceased to live in favour of simply existing. He only checked into rehab following an accidental (though he had grown wilfully careless with his dosages) overdose.

Rehab, the first time, actually put him on track. It was hideously boring enough to drive him back to sport, and he left rehab with his black belt in judo, and a hell of a lot of boxing practice under his belt to boot. He also got back into playing violin. After leaving, he went travelling; he did the Continent, then he did America, where he met Martha Hudson and managed to ensure that her godawful husband was sentenced to death. He resumed bothering police, and horrified gendarmes, Polizei and NYPD officers alike. He actually got a few real cases.

But his mind never seemed to go fast enough for him, and he was terrified that he’d permanently broken some part of his brain, which was how he ended up snorting coke in New York before moving swiftly on to IV use. At first, it felt wonderful. For perhaps the first time, he felt entirely in control of his life. He got more cases and ripped through them, feeling larger than life and generally scintillatingly brilliant, and once more sliding out of his own control.

It was only when he contracted septic arthritis in his left elbow due to an infected injection site that he stopped, forced to begin detoxing by virtue of being confined to a hospital bed, feverish and delusional. Enough to make it hard for anyone to lay their hands on Class A drugs, really. Once his arm was good as new, he was already well into withdrawals, chose to check himself into rehab again. Which was worse the second time around.

But he got out. And when he got out, there was a case already waiting for him; an old school friend whose girlfriend and au pair had gone simultaneously missing. Afterwards, the Met kept his number.

For five years, then, he successfully stayed afloat, though they were rather white-knuckle. With the risk of relapse always high and Mycroft trying to balance looking after him with not being seen to control him, Sherlock went from bedsit to bedsit, often not eating or sleeping properly, rarely able to consistently make rent, but nonetheless clean and doing his work.

In 2010, having been kicked out of his flat in Montague Street, he met Dr John Watson, and proceeded to try to scare him off as best he could. Here, have a list of my worst attributes. Let me reel off some creepy facts about you. We don’t know each other, let’s be flatmates. To which John said (more or less), “Okay.”

Which, okay, Sherlock wasn’t expecting, and which he probably still isn’t over.

This was the beginning of a period of Sherlock’s life characterised by both a startling stability and also a sense of genuine control over him life. The support system at Baker Street—him, John, Mrs Hudson—was one made up of people he had chosen to be around, and people who, despite their better judgement, actually seemed to like him.

Which leads us to the events of the show, as detailed here.

▲ World

The world of Sherlock is, for all intents and purposes, our standard modern-day Earth. Specific aspects of our world take precedence in the story, however: darkness, danger, urban adventure, politics, psychological warfare. Some of the characters (Sherlock included) often seem astonishingly larger than life, a fact which is frequently lampshaded by the world's more down-to-earth residents. (My thanks to Laura!)

▲ Abilities & Talents

+ Observation & Deduction 10
Sherlock has an extraordinary ability to not just notice facts and details, but also to understand how they relate to one another, allowing him to draw conclusions through logical reasoning and analysis. This also depends on a huge range of specialised and occasionally apparently arbitrary knowledge.

+ Physical combat 8
Sherlock is a dirty fighter with some actual training (judo, boxing etc) and a fair amount of real world experience. He’s particularly good at weaponising whatever comes to hand. His style is brutal, with no wasted movement, and er—for him, pain tends not to kick in until long after the event, so he’ll just keep going. Which leads us to...

+ Physical endurance 9
This is more to do with Sherlock being able to detach himself from his body than anything; while he’s in pretty good condition for a man who takes such little care of himself, his ability to force himself to keep going no matter what could ultimately be more dangerous to his health than anything. Same goes for his ridiculously high pain tolerance. That said, it gets the job done.

+ Swordfighting 7
You mentioned it, so I’m including Sherlock’s most anachronistic skill; give him a sword and he can fuck you up. Most people can fuck something up with a sword, given that they’re long and sharp, but he can do it with style and skill. Unfortunately, due to wielding a sword in a setting not traditionally given to them, this also gives him a skill level 7 in looking like a twit.

+ Agility 8
When it comes to running, jumping and climbing, he's pretty damn swift.

+ Lock-picking 9
What it says on the tin. In fact, Sherlock is rather good at most of the skills a decent thief needs.

+ Escapology 7
Again: what it says on the tin. Similar to lockpicking, but slightly hampered by, you know, being restrained, and by Sherlock's inevitable frustration with the situation.

+ Firearms 7
Sherlock's capable with a firearm, though the most practice/training he gets or has had involves walls, and shooting through them. In the privacy of his flat, he's capable of some pretty fancy shooting, but in actual stressful situations his aim suffers.

+ Cryptography/Codebreaking 9
Codebreaking is sort of essential for any classic detective. Right? (He gets especially good at it when there's someone he wants to impress standing over his shoulder, apparently).

▲ Personality

Given that it's Sherlock Holmes, starting with the brain seems obligatory. Sherlock's genius is startling: he's startlingly intelligent, and possesses the ability to 'observe and deduce' people's secrets in seconds. He has a skill for both noticing details and understanding the links between them; his brain is both highly analytical and highly atypical. Sherlock's mind, in a lot of ways, defines him—even he insists that his body is 'just transport' for his intellect. However, his genius can backfire; he has a constant need for mental stimulation, stating that his brain 'rots' without it. He's also seen being driven to a state of serious manic distraction by a lack of cases in Hound (although interestingly, this is immediately after solving a case, suggesting that this state is actually a natural occurrence within Sherlock's brain chemistry, and that in this instance, the cases are acting as distractions from his mental state rather than dictating it).

Diagnosing Sherlock with exact syndromes and disorders presents various problems, as he's rarely a textbook example of anything and in-universe he has absolutely no inclination to seek out any kind of diagnosis. He certainly suffers from periods of depression, mania and hyperactivity, and I also play him as being somewhere on the autism spectrum, due to a variety of different factors (prone to stimming, obsessive interests, difficulty with social interaction and reading social cues etc) and the workings of his brain taken as a whole.

Sherlock's character in some way revolves around issues of control. In some ways, he's controlling when it comes to the people around him, though the obvious symptoms of this (demanding John and Mrs Hudson more or less wait on him, with varying levels of success; walking all over Scotland Yard) tend to be either to do with laziness or a desire to do his work. His real manipulation tends to be through keeping secrets from people, or telling them outright lies (experimenting on John in Hound; ...Reichenbach). Often, this stems from his inability to trust people with the truth and his assumption that as (often) the cleverest person in the room, it's only well and good that he be in charge of things.

His most obvious attempts to exert control, however, are directed towards himself. One of the reasons he dislikes getting close to people is due to a fear of compromising his own fierce instinct towards independence. (An instinct which, unfortunately, is completely at odds with his utter impracticality; to some extent, Sherlock wants independence without responsibility, which doesn't work out well for him). He struggles to control his own mind, and goes to unnerving extents to try and rein it in and hone it, by refusing to eat and sleep while on cases.

In some ways, Sherlock is repulsed by his own humanity: he doesn't want to admit to being anything less than a perfect logical machine. Conversely—he isn't a machine, he's a human being, and as such has a completely natural urge to connect with other human beings. Being Sherlock, this very simple desire ends up very complicated where he's concerned.

At a very early age, he became more or less convinced of his own inability to understand the rest of humanity on any meaningful emotional level, and of the rest of humanity's inability to understand him on any level. This was due to a combination of factors, including his intelligence and way of perceiving/interpreting the world, his lack of social skills, his general bent towards selfishness and spikiness, and his lack of much socialisation as a young child. As an adult, particularly before meeting John, he views trying to interact with the world as something like trying to yell through a soundproof window: transmitting and not receiving. (“You’re all so vacant”, in other words).

Obviously, this is coloured by a certain superiority, and a mentality that can be best summed-up as ‘me vs them’. Sherlock is both convinced of his own superiority and eternally on the defensive—regarding said superiority and also his own insecurities, of which he has many. He values his intelligence as what ‘sets him above’, not just because he’s a snob and an overachiever (in his way) who quails at the idea of being one of the blundering masses, but because he’s aware that by many other standards, he’s in no way ‘superior’ at all. He has a long history of substance abuse and having no fixed abode nor steady job; he struggles to look after himself, despite his desire for independence. He believes that he’s more or less naturally unsuited to ‘normal’ life, and clings to his intelligence for validation. And therefore somehow manages to stay both horribly arrogant and horribly insecure at once.

Still, he does genuinely want to connect with a select number of other people. He wants to understand and be understood and the rarity of this means that when it happens, it affects him hugely, and he can be driven to extreme lengths to protect the people he cares about.

Interestingly, he’s actually surprisingly good when it comes to calming people down in a crisis, as seen with Sarah Sawyer, Henry Knight, etc. This probably stems from various factors: firstly, he has the ability to step back from a situation and stay calm rather than let other people’s panic get to him; secondly, with his brain what it is, he has probably spent more time than most trying to navigate his own thought processes, and therefore does a lot more thinking about thinking than most people do; thirdly, he’s personally accustomed to being overwhelmed by emotion and feeling his logical capacity come into conflict with other parts of his mind.

Rather than consider Sherlock emotionless, or possessing a limited emotional range, I would argue that his emotions are intense and varied, but that his emotional reactions don't line up with the expected stimulus. He also struggles to understand, name and react to his own emotions. Often his response to intense, bewildering emotion is to be unnerved or angry with either the cause of it or himself. His outbursts of emotion are often very physical; he'll pace, tear up the living room, shoot holes in the wall, or physically shake—the latter coming from the incident in Hounds. The same incident (and other, less overt instances—his “shut up all of you!” in ASIP, the wild camera angles and his distracted noises on the rooftop in TRF) can also be seen as an example of his brain being overloaded and overwhelmed.

That said, he has a serious lack of emotional maturity. He’s self-centred and often childish, desiring instant gratification and wanting everything to be “clever”. He’s easily dissatisfied, impractical and often just plain unpleasant: his default reaction to a lot of things is anger, and he often strikes out with excessive force when he’s feeling threatened. (This is usually verbal, but there’s a wonderful moment in TRF where he’s incredibly on edge and winds up nearly punching somebody who has just pushed him out of the way of a moving car). Or indeed when he wants something: he’s completely ruthless when it comes to getting his work done.

With regard to his work; he definitely ‘plays the game for the game’s own sake’, often forgetting that there are real human lives at stake or lost while he concentrates on the problem he’s been presented with. He’s routinely fairly callous about death, pain and suffering, often to the faces of people dealing with said things on a personal basis. Nonetheless, while he maintains that he’s ‘not one of [the angels]’, he’s ‘on [their] side’, and there is something stopping him from—well, becoming a murderer due to boredom. (Admittedly, needing this clarification does speak volumes about him). He actually repeatedly asks if people are alright (John, Irene) after having just caused someone’s death, and compared to John has a fairly low body count. (This is true of most people). (Except, like, Mycroft ‘I’ve got a plane full of them’ Holmes, and he didn’t do that personally).

▲ Sexuality

Sherlock views sex as ‘not his area’. This is related to him being repulsed by his own humanity, and wanting to separate himself from the needs of his own body. He’s celibate by choice, and arguably/termed by others a virgin, though whether he applies that label to himself varies. He has had some sexual encounters, with one male partner during university. As far as orientation goes, he can be attracted to any gender but leans somewhat towards men; he doesn’t identify as anything but ‘beep boop I have no emotions and we’re not talking about this’, and goes out of his way to avoid thinking about it or categorising himself, particularly when it comes to assigning himself a community. When it comes to fantasies (and he does fantasise, although his libido is usually very low) specific physical traits don’t tend to crop up so much as kinks; he’s masochistic, sadistic, and prefers submission to domination, though it’s not something he thinks of in those terms.

Witness: a helpful bingo card.

▲ Reason for Playing

I desperately want to play out horrible existential freakouts. ...Yes. This, by the way, won’t just be immediately after his arrival, but will impact on his characterisation throughout the rest of the game; he’s likely to be more erratic, more frenzied than usual, but he’ll also throw himself into any distractions with an unnerving fervency.

As far as character arcs go; I feel like his Object is really going to influence what happens with his character development, and his CR too. CR with Sherlock is really its own type of development for him, because meaningful CR often means he has to re-evaluate his ever-weakening and ever-more-loopholed ‘me vs them’ boundary. (Also, ahaha, there may be hugely unsurprising brotherly collaboration plans).

I think Juncture will be a good fit for Sherlock, too, because of things like the jobs board, the over arching plot, the general setting: he doesn’t exactly work well in slice of life settings, and having something to do and a mystery to occupy his brain will both provide interesting situations to play him in and ensure he remains playable, because without something to he implodes. (...More so when he’s just been transported to another world, oh God).

▲ Object

How about ‘make it terrible and terribly interesting’? I trust the modteam on this one.

▲ Writing Samples

+ the colour of our planet from far far away; a narrative.
After ten hours, he rises again, considerably one-upping Christ.

+ surprising absolutely no one; a d_m post
Bitch bitch bitch.

▲ Ticky Boxes

Are you over the age of eighteen?
✔ I certainly am!

Are you aware of the skillcheck system and comfortable with the fact that while your character cannot die without your express permission, they may get into some serious trouble?
✔ Most definitely!

Are you ready to rumble?
✔ I say, yes!