bateleur | (no subject)

work in progress
basics.

character: Marco Alisdair
fandom: The Night Circus
gender: male
age: 18, about to turn 19.

appearance:

Marco is a handsome young man, clean-shaven, with dark hair and green-tinged grey eyes. However, he typically hides his true face behind one constructed by his magic — one that is even more attractive, with sharper lines, a small goatee, and unnaturally bright green eyes.

Although there is apparently a movie in works for this book, I will be using icons of John Keats ( as played by Ben Whishaw ) from the movie Bright Star as a PB in the meantime. If this isn't okay, please let me know.

personality:

At first glance, Marco is rather unassuming. He's quiet and polite, almost dutifully so, with no pretensions to flamboyance. Even in a crowd, he tends to keep to himself, usually only there to see instead of to be seen. Combined with his magical talents, this means that one would be hard-pressed to even notice him if he does not wish to be noticed. When speaking to others, he's unfailingly courteous, displaying just the right amount of curiosity and interest... but with that being said, it's not uncommon from someone to walk away from a lengthy conversation and realize that they haven't learned anything new about him. According to another character, Marco is a man who pretends to be less than he is — and he seldom goes out of his way to change that.

However,

history:

Once upon a time, there was a boy who lived in an orphanage in London, England. He wore ragged hand-me-downs, but he was not mistreated. On the contrary, his days there were long and uneventful. Although he liked to read, he had already finished all the books he could get his hands on long before his ninth birthday, and so he was left to face a life of no particular interest.

That is, if something else had not happened before his ninth birthday.

In January of 1874, a tall man in a grey suit came to visit the orphanage and expressed his wish to adopt a child. His criteria were strange and confusing, but the headmistress eventually selected three children for his appraisal. The boy was included in this small group, and the man in grey spoke with him for far longer than the other two.

At the end of their conversation, the man in grey told the boy that he would be leaving the orphanage to study under his tutelage, unless he wanted to stay where he was. The boy accepted his offer. The man in grey nodded, filled out the necessary paperwork, made the necessary arrangements... but he never once asked the boy's name.

However, the man in grey did not lie about his intentions. In the great scheme of things, names were not important to him, and so the boy remained anonymous for the next six years. During that time, the boy lived alone in a townhouse in London where he had everything he needed — except, perhaps, for the voices of strangers. His meals were brought to his door in covered trays and removed by hands he never saw. His hair was cut and kept tidy by a man who visited him once a month but did not speak, and the same man also measured him for new clothes once a year. Left largely to his own devices, the boy spent the majority of his time reading and writing, working his way through the sizable collection of books in the townhouse library and copying down what catches his interest in notebooks. He read histories, mythologies, and novels — anything to take his mind off the silence and his solitude. In the course of doing this, he also learned several languages... though, without anyone around to practice with, he did not become proficient at speaking them for quite some time.

Only the man in grey spoke to him when he visited — once a day for precisely one hour, usually with a new pile of books for the boy. But aside from those, the daily calls also brought with them a strange combination of both confusion and excitement; the hour was mostly spent on listening to the man in grey talk — with rare practical demonstrations — about numerous subjects that the boy was uncertain he would ever understand.

Yet he did, and soon he understood those lessons to be lessons in magic.

With the man in grey, the boy learned a great deal about it, listening and watching with as much quiet intensity as he had read his books. Illusions, divination, manipulation of both the physical and the abstract, conjuring and enchanting — he was soon familiar with it all. However, on the occasion that the boy asked the man in grey about being able to use what he had learned, he was told that he was not ready for it yet... and he was not deemed ready for a while.

Then came the day when the man in grey announced that they would be learning about binding. After the requisite lecture, the boy was presented with a silver ring and instructed to place it on his finger. When the boy did, the ring started to burn and sink into his skin and — despite the boy's best efforts at taking it off — vanished, leaving a thin scar.

Bindings are permanent, said the man in grey. He instructed the boy not to concern himself with it further, since the specific consequences were not to affect the his life for quite a long time. Still, that didn't stop the boy from gazing at the scar at night, wondering just who and what it was that he had been bound to.

Years passed. The boy grew up.

Just before he turned nineteen, he was moved from the townhouse to a modest flat elsewhere in the city. The man in grey no longer visited him each day, and the boy understood that he was to continue his studies on his own. With this change, however, came something that he was not quite accustomed to: freedom, from the order and strict schedules of his childhood.

This is where this story begins.

abilities:

Marco is a magician, albeit one who does not need legerdemain or stage props to work his magic — or even a stage at all. Indeed, he would feel very uncomfortable if he had to perform on one, since his talents don't lie in the direction of pulling rabbits out of hats or turning handkerchiefs into doves. Instead, they're focused around a little less theatrical but equally — if not more — surprising: the manipulation of perception. To be specific, he specializes in creating illusions, ranging from something as simple as laying a glamour over an unwanted scar to something as elaborate as crafting an entirely new reality drawing upon nothing more than his imagination and dreams. Though he can't alter the actual nature of his surroundings, he can make the change seem very very real to the person who is meant to see the illusion. An empty London street in the rain becomes a

First Person (entry type):

London is — a far more crowded city than I remember.

I confess, sometimes I wonder if it is all nothing more than a strange sort of dream. The kind where the world is entirely silent, and you are unsure whether or not you can make a sound yourself. How is it possible for so many people to walk beside each other, close enough to touch, and say not a word to anyone as they go to this place or that place? Even strangers in books are more amiable to each other than this lot.

Still, I suppose there is something to be said for being able to leave the flat whenever I wish.

Finding a good glass of wine here seems an impossible task, though.

( and if that's not enough, here is the corresponding commentspam c: )

Third Person: