Revenance Application
Mar. 23rd, 2014 07:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
woosterlyways[OOC Information]
Name: QV
Age: 18
AIM/Plurk/Dreamwidth/Email: applestoatoms@gmail.com/questionableVeracity/no personal DW/same as AIM
What characters do you already play here, if any? None!
How did you hear about the game? Cygna waved it in my face a few times way back when it was just starting up.
[IC Information]
Character Name: Bertram Wilberforce Wooster
Series: Jeeves & Wooster and The Jeeves Stories by P.G. Wodehouse
Gender: Male
Age: 25
Species: Extremely human
Appearance: Bertie is a tall, skinny man - though he’d be much more inclined to describe himself as “willowy” - standing at about 6’1”. His hair is blond, short and curly, his eyes are blue, and his skin is moderately pale. He is, in more or less all respects, a fairly average caucasian male with nothing particularly remarkable about him. Perhaps his most noticeable feature is his fashion sense (or occasional lack thereof). As a man of the Jazz Age, Bertie dresses almost exclusively in suits when out on the town and owns a wide variety of them, some of them tasteful and others… not so. Usually he can be seen in what would have been considered fashionable for a member of the English upper crust in the 1920’s, though sometimes strange things can happen when he’s allowed to get creative.
Personality: Probably the best summary of Bertram W. Wooster’s disposition is that he’s something like a puppy given human form who then proceeded to join a fraternity. Alternatingly energetic and astoundingly lazy, Bertie is cheerful, optimistic, loyal to a fault, and not terribly bright. Canonically, many of his adventures stem from his inability to refuse requests made of him by friends and family, usually out of a combination of his intrinsically giving nature, strict personal code of honor, and/or inability to stand up for himself in the face of a stern talking to. (He does occasionally show some spine, but in the few instances where he does so it’s treated as a particularly notable event.)
However, it is also important to note here that while Bertie is often called upon to resolve various problems, he’s just as likely if not more so to make everything notably worse than make it any better. Bertie is something of a bumbler by nature. Being a character straight from the pages of British farce, this isn’t entirely his fault, as the universe sometimes seems to really have it in for the poor man, but oftentimes his grand schemes rely on contrived coincidences, people reacting exactly as he expects them to, and everything going to plan. He means well, but his general idiocy and apparently having wronged an elemental spirit of luck somewhere along the line usually result in someone (read: Jeeves) having to bail him out of his own messes.
Overall, when not being roped into the machinations of his aunts, cousins, or friends, Bertie is pretty content to stick to the status quo. If he can sleep in, drink with his friends, go to the theater every now and again, and not find himself engaged to anyone threatening to make something useful of him, he’ll be a happy man.
Abilities: What skills.
More seriously, Bertie is, as mentioned above, a very average human man. He’s a member of the idle rich and has never worked a day in his life. He’s the smartest of all of his friends, but that says more about who he runs with than his own mental faculties, which he himself admits are somewhat lacking. It’s fair enough to say that most all of his actual talents lie in fields that would impress drunk people. Darts, golf, that sort of thing. Probably the most widely applicable is his ear for music. He’s a talented pianist and can pick up songs he’s only heard once and play them by ear almost perfectly the next day (though don’t expect him to remember all the words) as well as being a decent singer.
Bertie is also a graduate of Oxford. His managing not to fail out probably has more than something to do with money and family status, of course, but he does show his education in his own way. He has a solid grasp of English literature, often quoting the greats in idle conversation from Shakespeare to Coleridge, but he often forgets the latter halves of his quotations and needs help to finish them properly. Faulty memory aside, he’s a decent writer as well, being the narrator of most of the stories in which he appears.
Oh, and also he was once struck by lightning and was entirely fine once the shock (har har) wore off.
Items: Likely just a suit and a hat and gloves suitable for a wealthy gentleman about town.
History: Canon is fairly vague and occasionally self-contradictory on the subject of Bertie’s early life and family, but what it does tell us is this; Bertie was orphaned, likely at a young age, and raised by his aunts. Bertie has an older sister who, at some point, married and had three daughters (though he at one point claims to have no siblings but she’s referenced multiple times so let’s just ignore that). He attended Eton College, a well-renowned English boarding school, graduated Oxford after, then proceeded to do nothing in particular, staying in his merry little holding pattern of drinking, getting into harmless mischief with his friends, being trod upon by his aunts, and not much else.
This is where the start of canon finds him, living in a flat in London and having just fired his previous valet for stealing his socks. The replacement, a man named Reginald Jeeves, is dispatched shortly and arrives to find Bertie rather intensely hungover, whereupon he quickly whips up a miracle cure and the two become fast friends.
Well, not quite. It would be more accurate to say that Bertie accepted Jeeves into his life quickly and without question as just another valet and continues to go about his business, that being getting unwillingly engaged to various high society ladies, being roped into the schemes of his aunts and compatriots, attempting to meddle in the love lives of his more marriage-minded friends, and generally being hapless. Needless to say these incidents never turned out well for Bertie, but fortunately Jeeves was always there with some master plan, ready to save the day (usually by making Bertie out to be the fool to redirect ire towards him or make him seem too useless to warrant any or some similar thing, but so it goes) and in the process won Bertie’s respect and admiration time and time again.
Now, the above happened a great many times over the course of a multitude of short stories to the point where trying to sum up all of them would compose a small novella in and of itself, but the highlights to give an idea of what sort of situations Bertie often found himself in are as follows:
The first, wherein Bertie’s Aunt Agatha arranges for him to be engaged to one Honoria Glossop, in the hopes that she will “mold him” and balance out his many shortcomings. He is sent (along with Jeeves) to the Glossop estate, where he finds his friend Bingo (who is actually infatuated with Honoria) and hatches a plan to get Honoria to fall for Bingo and get himself off the hook in the process. It involves himself pushing her nephew into the river and Bingo coming to rescue him from a watery fate, but backfires when Bingo gets distracted by another woman and Bertie is forced to fish the child out himself. Honoria is flattered by the ridiculous theatricality of the gesture and accepts his proposal. This is where Jeeves steps in, covertly planting a number of things Honoria’s parents find detestable (cats, for example, and Mr. Glossop’s stolen hat) around Bertie’s apartment just before they arrive to size up this new suitor. Upon discovering these things gradually, over the course of an increasingly fraught supper, the two come to the conclusion that Bertie is extremely unfit to marry their daughter and call everything off, sparing Bertie the threat of marriage after all.
And another, not the next but just generally indicative of the state of things, wherein Bertie’s Aunt Dahlia instructs him to attempt to drive down the price of a silver cow creamer her husband has his eye on by expressing incredulity at its authenticity to its current owner. He tries, but only succeeds in bringing it to the attention of another collector, Sir Watkyn Basset, who buys it first. Aunt Dahlia then tasks him with stealing it from them, threatening to cut him off from the services of her personal chef Anatole, who is the greatest chef of all time or so Bertie claims. Since this is clearly a state of emergency, Bertie and Jeeves go, pretending to visit in order to case the joint, so to speak, only to find another acquaintance of Bertie’s. Stiffy Byng, Sir Basset’s ward, wishes to marry a man of whom her guardian disapproves, and asks Bertie to steal the cow creamer but let the man in question beat him up (for the sake of plausibility!) and return it to earn Basset’s favor. Now in the direst of dire straits, Bertie turns to Jeeves, who is able to sneak the cow creamer out from under everyone’s noses, disguising it as the hood ornament of a car and only revealing this clever ruse once everyone had given up on looking for it and they were well and safely away from the Basset estate.
And perhaps most importantly of these ones that I’m actually bothering to sum up is the incident where Bertie attempted to learn to play the banjolele, an extremely undignified string instrument combining all the tiny children’s instrument-ness of a ukulele and all of the gracelessness of a banjo. Jeeves was not in favor of this, but Bertie in one of his fits of stubbornness refused to stop practicing loudly at all hours, much less actually give it up. Everyone gets so fed up with the constant racket that he winds up kicked out of his flat. This hardly discourages him, though, and he announces his intention to spend the summer in the country and hone his talent, whereupon Jeeves tells him that should he insist on continuing to play the banjolele, he would be forced to resign. Bertie, hurt and more than a little bit upset that Jeeves doesn’t like his playing, digs in his heels and tells him that if that’s what he wants, then so be it. The two of them part ways and Bertie hires a replacement valet and moves to the countryside as planned. Suffice to say that it doesn’t go well. A great many things happen and it’s all very complicated but not completely relevant here aside from the fact that it all culminates in the new valet burning Bertie’s house down and Bertie having to spend the night sleeping in the potting shed, where he awakes to a sympathetic Jeeves offering to return to his service (now that the accursed instrument is no longer an issue, having been destroyed in the fire).
After this, the two of them continued on their merry way through the years, dodging unwanted engagements, committing the occasional reluctant heist, and in one case even arranging the covert meeting of a pair of captains of industry that resulted in everyone involved (save Jeeves) being struck by lightning. Gradually, all of the women who considered Bertie a potential suitor were married off, though never without notable incident, and one day, in the course of one of their misadventures Jeeves revealed to Bertie that he had destroyed all of the notes he had taken on him over the course of his employment for the Junior Ganymede Club’s book, that being an archive of all the eccentricities and difficulties of all of the club’s members’ employers, meant as a guide and a warning for any valet looking for a job. However, Jeeves declared that he intended to stay in Bertie’s employ for as long as he was allowed, hopefully indefinitely, and thus the notes were no longer necessary. Bertie happily agreed with this plan of action, and it is from just after this turn of events that I’ll be taking him from.
Name: QV
Age: 18
AIM/Plurk/Dreamwidth/Email: applestoatoms@gmail.com/questionableVeracity/no personal DW/same as AIM
What characters do you already play here, if any? None!
How did you hear about the game? Cygna waved it in my face a few times way back when it was just starting up.
[IC Information]
Character Name: Bertram Wilberforce Wooster
Series: Jeeves & Wooster and The Jeeves Stories by P.G. Wodehouse
Gender: Male
Age: 25
Species: Extremely human
Appearance: Bertie is a tall, skinny man - though he’d be much more inclined to describe himself as “willowy” - standing at about 6’1”. His hair is blond, short and curly, his eyes are blue, and his skin is moderately pale. He is, in more or less all respects, a fairly average caucasian male with nothing particularly remarkable about him. Perhaps his most noticeable feature is his fashion sense (or occasional lack thereof). As a man of the Jazz Age, Bertie dresses almost exclusively in suits when out on the town and owns a wide variety of them, some of them tasteful and others… not so. Usually he can be seen in what would have been considered fashionable for a member of the English upper crust in the 1920’s, though sometimes strange things can happen when he’s allowed to get creative.
Personality: Probably the best summary of Bertram W. Wooster’s disposition is that he’s something like a puppy given human form who then proceeded to join a fraternity. Alternatingly energetic and astoundingly lazy, Bertie is cheerful, optimistic, loyal to a fault, and not terribly bright. Canonically, many of his adventures stem from his inability to refuse requests made of him by friends and family, usually out of a combination of his intrinsically giving nature, strict personal code of honor, and/or inability to stand up for himself in the face of a stern talking to. (He does occasionally show some spine, but in the few instances where he does so it’s treated as a particularly notable event.)
However, it is also important to note here that while Bertie is often called upon to resolve various problems, he’s just as likely if not more so to make everything notably worse than make it any better. Bertie is something of a bumbler by nature. Being a character straight from the pages of British farce, this isn’t entirely his fault, as the universe sometimes seems to really have it in for the poor man, but oftentimes his grand schemes rely on contrived coincidences, people reacting exactly as he expects them to, and everything going to plan. He means well, but his general idiocy and apparently having wronged an elemental spirit of luck somewhere along the line usually result in someone (read: Jeeves) having to bail him out of his own messes.
Overall, when not being roped into the machinations of his aunts, cousins, or friends, Bertie is pretty content to stick to the status quo. If he can sleep in, drink with his friends, go to the theater every now and again, and not find himself engaged to anyone threatening to make something useful of him, he’ll be a happy man.
Abilities: What skills.
More seriously, Bertie is, as mentioned above, a very average human man. He’s a member of the idle rich and has never worked a day in his life. He’s the smartest of all of his friends, but that says more about who he runs with than his own mental faculties, which he himself admits are somewhat lacking. It’s fair enough to say that most all of his actual talents lie in fields that would impress drunk people. Darts, golf, that sort of thing. Probably the most widely applicable is his ear for music. He’s a talented pianist and can pick up songs he’s only heard once and play them by ear almost perfectly the next day (though don’t expect him to remember all the words) as well as being a decent singer.
Bertie is also a graduate of Oxford. His managing not to fail out probably has more than something to do with money and family status, of course, but he does show his education in his own way. He has a solid grasp of English literature, often quoting the greats in idle conversation from Shakespeare to Coleridge, but he often forgets the latter halves of his quotations and needs help to finish them properly. Faulty memory aside, he’s a decent writer as well, being the narrator of most of the stories in which he appears.
Oh, and also he was once struck by lightning and was entirely fine once the shock (har har) wore off.
Items: Likely just a suit and a hat and gloves suitable for a wealthy gentleman about town.
History: Canon is fairly vague and occasionally self-contradictory on the subject of Bertie’s early life and family, but what it does tell us is this; Bertie was orphaned, likely at a young age, and raised by his aunts. Bertie has an older sister who, at some point, married and had three daughters (though he at one point claims to have no siblings but she’s referenced multiple times so let’s just ignore that). He attended Eton College, a well-renowned English boarding school, graduated Oxford after, then proceeded to do nothing in particular, staying in his merry little holding pattern of drinking, getting into harmless mischief with his friends, being trod upon by his aunts, and not much else.
This is where the start of canon finds him, living in a flat in London and having just fired his previous valet for stealing his socks. The replacement, a man named Reginald Jeeves, is dispatched shortly and arrives to find Bertie rather intensely hungover, whereupon he quickly whips up a miracle cure and the two become fast friends.
Well, not quite. It would be more accurate to say that Bertie accepted Jeeves into his life quickly and without question as just another valet and continues to go about his business, that being getting unwillingly engaged to various high society ladies, being roped into the schemes of his aunts and compatriots, attempting to meddle in the love lives of his more marriage-minded friends, and generally being hapless. Needless to say these incidents never turned out well for Bertie, but fortunately Jeeves was always there with some master plan, ready to save the day (usually by making Bertie out to be the fool to redirect ire towards him or make him seem too useless to warrant any or some similar thing, but so it goes) and in the process won Bertie’s respect and admiration time and time again.
Now, the above happened a great many times over the course of a multitude of short stories to the point where trying to sum up all of them would compose a small novella in and of itself, but the highlights to give an idea of what sort of situations Bertie often found himself in are as follows:
The first, wherein Bertie’s Aunt Agatha arranges for him to be engaged to one Honoria Glossop, in the hopes that she will “mold him” and balance out his many shortcomings. He is sent (along with Jeeves) to the Glossop estate, where he finds his friend Bingo (who is actually infatuated with Honoria) and hatches a plan to get Honoria to fall for Bingo and get himself off the hook in the process. It involves himself pushing her nephew into the river and Bingo coming to rescue him from a watery fate, but backfires when Bingo gets distracted by another woman and Bertie is forced to fish the child out himself. Honoria is flattered by the ridiculous theatricality of the gesture and accepts his proposal. This is where Jeeves steps in, covertly planting a number of things Honoria’s parents find detestable (cats, for example, and Mr. Glossop’s stolen hat) around Bertie’s apartment just before they arrive to size up this new suitor. Upon discovering these things gradually, over the course of an increasingly fraught supper, the two come to the conclusion that Bertie is extremely unfit to marry their daughter and call everything off, sparing Bertie the threat of marriage after all.
And another, not the next but just generally indicative of the state of things, wherein Bertie’s Aunt Dahlia instructs him to attempt to drive down the price of a silver cow creamer her husband has his eye on by expressing incredulity at its authenticity to its current owner. He tries, but only succeeds in bringing it to the attention of another collector, Sir Watkyn Basset, who buys it first. Aunt Dahlia then tasks him with stealing it from them, threatening to cut him off from the services of her personal chef Anatole, who is the greatest chef of all time or so Bertie claims. Since this is clearly a state of emergency, Bertie and Jeeves go, pretending to visit in order to case the joint, so to speak, only to find another acquaintance of Bertie’s. Stiffy Byng, Sir Basset’s ward, wishes to marry a man of whom her guardian disapproves, and asks Bertie to steal the cow creamer but let the man in question beat him up (for the sake of plausibility!) and return it to earn Basset’s favor. Now in the direst of dire straits, Bertie turns to Jeeves, who is able to sneak the cow creamer out from under everyone’s noses, disguising it as the hood ornament of a car and only revealing this clever ruse once everyone had given up on looking for it and they were well and safely away from the Basset estate.
And perhaps most importantly of these ones that I’m actually bothering to sum up is the incident where Bertie attempted to learn to play the banjolele, an extremely undignified string instrument combining all the tiny children’s instrument-ness of a ukulele and all of the gracelessness of a banjo. Jeeves was not in favor of this, but Bertie in one of his fits of stubbornness refused to stop practicing loudly at all hours, much less actually give it up. Everyone gets so fed up with the constant racket that he winds up kicked out of his flat. This hardly discourages him, though, and he announces his intention to spend the summer in the country and hone his talent, whereupon Jeeves tells him that should he insist on continuing to play the banjolele, he would be forced to resign. Bertie, hurt and more than a little bit upset that Jeeves doesn’t like his playing, digs in his heels and tells him that if that’s what he wants, then so be it. The two of them part ways and Bertie hires a replacement valet and moves to the countryside as planned. Suffice to say that it doesn’t go well. A great many things happen and it’s all very complicated but not completely relevant here aside from the fact that it all culminates in the new valet burning Bertie’s house down and Bertie having to spend the night sleeping in the potting shed, where he awakes to a sympathetic Jeeves offering to return to his service (now that the accursed instrument is no longer an issue, having been destroyed in the fire).
After this, the two of them continued on their merry way through the years, dodging unwanted engagements, committing the occasional reluctant heist, and in one case even arranging the covert meeting of a pair of captains of industry that resulted in everyone involved (save Jeeves) being struck by lightning. Gradually, all of the women who considered Bertie a potential suitor were married off, though never without notable incident, and one day, in the course of one of their misadventures Jeeves revealed to Bertie that he had destroyed all of the notes he had taken on him over the course of his employment for the Junior Ganymede Club’s book, that being an archive of all the eccentricities and difficulties of all of the club’s members’ employers, meant as a guide and a warning for any valet looking for a job. However, Jeeves declared that he intended to stay in Bertie’s employ for as long as he was allowed, hopefully indefinitely, and thus the notes were no longer necessary. Bertie happily agreed with this plan of action, and it is from just after this turn of events that I’ll be taking him from.
