"Don't worry, I didn't make all my enemies all at once. It took me at least a couple of days."
BASICS
NAME: Ph'langes [Phillanges]
GENDER: Male
PRONOUNS: He/Him/His
ORIENTATION: Heterosexual (though he'd bed himself, if only he could)
BIRTHDATE: Spring 2723
AGE: 54 as of Spring 2777
LOCATION: Fort Weyr
OCCUPATION:
WING: Eclipse Wing
APPEARANCE
EYES: Light Brown
HAIR: ... hair?
HEIGHT AND BUILD: 5'8 and potbellied.
PLAY-BY: Thurop Van Orman
EXPY SOURCE: K'nuckles (The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack)
FULL APPEARANCE: Ph'langes is not ... a handsome man. By any means. Perhaps if the standards are low to begin with, maybe. His lack of hair runs hand-in-hand with his dental hygiene. Due to the later, many of his teeth are crooked, missing, or ... uh ... black. He does have whiskers if one would consider that pitiful patch of scrub on his chin a beard. Ph'langes' eyebrows amass the volume of hair that should be present on his scalp. His nose is horribly crooked and bulbous, capped with large warts. Ph'langes' detests physical activity and it shows in the spare tire of pudding consistency languishing at his hips. He is very rarely seen without his shamefully-crafted 'pirate hat' and most of his attire screams that he was born to live on the Pernese seas.
PERSONALITY
PERSONALITY: Ph'langes is not very active and likes to spend his time sleeping in his weyr or drinking ale at the dining hall. He likes to tell stories of his many (untrue) adventures, giving the impression of having lived an exciting life when truthfully he's an inactive good-for-nothing. Ph'langes is not very bright: he will throw dirty clothes into the bathing pool and literally expect them to leap back into his arms when they're clean. He's also illiterate, struggling to read even the most simple of sentences.
Ph'langes detests emotional moments and is incredibly misogynistic, believing women would take him for all he's worth and then dump him - ironic, considering that's exactly his MO. His selfish nature and willingness to take advantage of people for his own personal gain means he really does not have many - or any - friends ... if you don't include ale. Ale is his best buddy. They hang out every day and Ph'langes definitely has a problem. Despite how standoffish and closed off Ph'langes may be, he absolutely views Pancake and Bubbeth as his best friends ... even as family. But you would have to pull teeth to get that truth out of him.
HISTORY
FAMILY:
Metticanges - grandfather (82)
Mother (†)
Father (†)
Pancake - adopted son (15)
SIGNIFICANT OTHER: He fell in love with a mirror once.
BIRTHPLACE: Small port cothold on the coast by Keroon.
HISTORY: TW: Alcoholism, mention of death.
Ph'langes will happily prattle your ear off about his adventures on the high seas. Shipwrecks! Storms! Battles on the open ocean! Brawls on land! The search for buried treasure! The fact is, none of it is true. Born on Phillanges somewhere opposite of Keroon, his father passed shortly before he was born and his mother bled to death during childbirth. His grandfather took up the mantle as his caretaker. Unable to properly explain the death of his parents, Matticanges made up a story that they had been transformed into birds - something Phillanges believed for a good long time until he wisened up in his teens. Still, he enjoyed watching (and attempting to converse with) birds, hoping that there was some merit behind the falsehood.
Mettincanges aspired to raise the boy into a fine young lad, which went about as well as you'd expect in a rough port cothold. He got into far more scuffles than were 'acceptable' and made enemies quickly with his brash attitude. Phillanges certainly admired Seacraft and took every opportunity to join the trader ships setting out. They eventually stopped accepting him on when they realized Phillanges was good for little more than napping in the crow's nest.
At 21, a drunken Phillanges had a brief tryst with a married woman and was chased onto the docks by a furious husband. Phillanges untied a small raft to escape hands that were pretty intent on stabbing his face and sailed off into the sunset while blowing raspberries and making unseemly gestures. The problem was he got blown off course - if a course had even been set - with no means to row himself back to shore. He wound up on the doorstep of Ista Weyr, dehydrated and starving. They were good enough to nurse him back to health there.
The clutch hardening on the Sands started to crack on the day he was due to be given the boot back to his home cothold. With a chug of ale, Phillanges joined the stands - hooting and being a genuine nuisance. A hatchling blue stormed over to lecture him on his behavior and practically dragged him across the sands by his shirt, woozy and sloppy, to stand next to the other weyrlings.
Bubbeth picked him.
Ph'langes did not sign up for this.
Cue 18 months of hard sobriety - with Bubbeth about ready to snap off his hands when he dared to even think of a bottle. Once he assumed the role of a full rider, Ph'langes hit the alcohol hard. He attempted to resume his lazy activities and Bubbeth, bless his soul, curb-stomped old habits to the best of his abilities. Chores! Drills! Training! For blessed's sake, there was a war going on! Getting Ph'langes to perform even the simplest of tasks was like pulling teeth. He dragged his feet at virtually everything that didn't include catnapping in a sunbeam. His blue lifemate made sure Ph'langes was in tip-top shape. Bubbeth succeeded at least 9/10 of the time - even if that meant his human partner was pissing and moaning the whole way through.
Threadfall brought an end to the Interval War. Ph'langes was forced to fly adragonback to fight Thread and showed to actually be pretty capable and reliable so long as he was in the air. But the second his feet touched the ground, back to dragging hid feet. In 2761 Ph'langes was approached with the suggestion from a wingrider of transferring to Fort Weyr or High Reaches following Golre's fall. Ph'langes wasn't interested but Bubbeth voiced her desire to join Fort in light of their recent final battle with the Mad Gods. And Bubbeth rarely lost on argument.
Within their first year of becoming a Fortian, Ph'langes and Bubbeth stumbled upon a lost babe who'd toddled off from the creche all the way to Fort Lake. For Bubbeth, it was love at first sight. They returned little Pancake safely but Ph'langes blue counterpart could not be separated from the child. During whatever downtime that could muster, he would linger close to the creche and make pointed efforts to be close to the toddler, who as he grew older started to become attached to Ph'langes as well. So much so that the little kid was his shadow. Ph'langes entertained him with great falsehoods of past adventures and Pancake began to idolize the aging rider to the point of obsession. Eventually Pancake was going to Ph'langes weyr to sleep beside Bubbeth at night, cheerily dance and laugh with Ph'langes, and more or less became something akin to his own child.
Ph'langes was not a great role model. His version of teaching skills ended, on multiple occasions, with the two of them caught up in some kind of trouble. Worse yet, Ph'langes would sometimes frame Pancake to take the fall in order to get off scott free. Bubbeth was always quick to lay into his rider: How dare you get my baby in trouble! But Pancake never wavered in his devotion. And the day his 'son' was old enough to become a candidate, Ph'langes wiped a tear from his eye and questioned what emotion he was feeling.
VOICE: Gravelly and gritty, like somebody who inhaled far too much sea salt growing up.
