Dixie Fiend

The Walking Dead: Los Angeles

- Character Sheet -

Name:
Mark Klase

Age:
23

Gender:
Male

Appearance:
Mark's simply as generic as it gets, like Emmet from The LEGO Movie - the most mediocre, average, not special person there is. Maybe not completely average, everyone has something to them.

Mark sports a nicely groomed mop of ash brown hair, grown out in a long fashion that stops just above his shoulders. Like his dad when he was younger, he disliked the feeling of hair in his eyes and on his forehead; so he would typically grow it out long enough to part or tie it back, or he'd have it cut exceptionally short. With his bangs tucked back behind his ears or to the side of his face, one could see... Well, let's start with the top of his head and move down, that seems the easiest.

His eyebrows are a little weird, let's say that. Just a little. The best way to explain it would be to say they're flat across the top of his eye sockets, but cut at a sharp angle near the outer corners of his eyes - which make it seem like he's scowling sometimes whenever he's not laughing or deadpanned. Whatever, moving on he's got some pretty plain eyes. They're blue. Not like a deep deep blue, but a normal kind of blue. I mean, there's millions of people in the world with blue eyes, I don't know how amazing a pair of blue eyes can get.

Mark's got a peculiar nose, perched below and just between his eyes relatively acutely. His friends sometimes would tease him about having a Jew nose, but Mark disagreed - as he considered himself rather experienced at stereotyping others - and believed his nose was too narrow, although oblong, to be a Jew nose. As a great man once said on the Boondocks, "Man you gotta' nose so thick with meat that you could make a ham sammich' with that shit"

Examining on, Mark's got a thinly pair of lips that get quite full with color when he's angry, or startled. But most of the time they're relatively pale, and almost ghostly when he's sick. Mark's extremely self-conscious about his teeth, but even that strong anxiety alone wasn't enough to make him take better care of his teeth. It's not like they're messed up or anything, they're just not blindingly white. Anyways, the final notable part of his facial construct would be his slightly angular jawline and chin. The strong/sharp look to his jaw was probably the only redeeming quality of his entire "look", but he didn't have prominent cheekbones that all the celebrity hotties have and shit. In fact, his cheekbones were pretty much non-existent. He had those lanky, nerdy cheekbones.

It's probably a neat thing to say, if you look really closely at Mark's chin you can make out that it's slanted - as if one side of his chin has really softened. Habits can really fuck up your shit, you know. All throughout elementary school as a kid, Mark felt strangely uncomfortable having his hands at his side or in his lap. His parents thought this to be ADHD, as he would always be moving his hands if he didn't have them crossed over his chest or when he was sitting he'd perch the side of his chin onto his palm, elbow against a table or something. But he only showed signs of ADHD when in good company, and when he went to be tested - he was locked down like a bank safe, and would not be cracked as anything more than a shy little kid with mildly selective OCD tendencies.

Anyways, getting really off-topic here, Mark didn't realize what his habit of leaning on his palm in class was doing until he was in high school - and his dentist who was getting x-rays prior to having his wisdom teeth removed noticed a major difference in the bone structure of his chin. It was a shocking surprise to Mark. So kids, moral of the story is to be careful of developing bad habits...

So, I'll be quick to describe the rest of Mark's appearance. The guy's only 5'9", which is decently short for the amount of relatively tall southerners from his hometown in Georgia. He doesn't have any build at all really, only weighing around 150lb. In high school, he participated in their Junior ROTC program(which happened to be the greatest part of his high school life) so there was a niche of competitiveness between the athletic cadets for who had the greatest body. No matter how much Mark tried to eat and diet healthy, he couldn't bulk up - like most of the cadets. Annoying as it was, he did the one thing he could do as a skinny weakling. He got abs.

But those have almost completely disappeared, so Mark's got nothing to him really but an edgy fading tattoo of a scorpion right below his collarbone on his chest.

Family:
Eh. Mark was never a functional member of his family. He was always distant from his parents, meeting their expectations but nothing more. He looked up to his dad and his older brother, but their relationship was always estranged. Late into Mark's high school life he realized, humorously, that he never actually had an emotional connection with his family. At all. He realized that all his life, his dad was a total fucking hardass and his mom was just plainly dumb sometimes when it came to being a parent; although Mark couldn't exactly blame his mother, he knew she had a decently rough family life growing up... And being as shy as he was, he didn't exactly want to drag his older brother or sister into any shit he may have been feeling growing up, or going through. He always thought that it was normal. That's how family's actually are. He thought it was him who bottled things in, it was his fault things may be a little different for him, but eventually he figured out that he only started to bottle shit up because... Well... No one was ever there for him. No one. I guess you could say that's why he turned to marijuana and alcohol in high school, but in his defense Mark used it in moderation. Getting stoned, or wasted, was his excuse to dump anything that was on his mind onto his friends.

The only family connection he had after growing the fuck up was with his older sister, whom he was exceptionally close with. He lost contact completely with his family and sister post outbreak, of course.

Personality:
To put Mark's personality into one word, the first thing that comes to mind would be indifferent. He's pretty desensitized, and plainly doesn't give two shits about a lot of things. He's quite caring when he means to be, and has a good set of morals and is generally a good person - but, he's spiteful and likes to do his own thing. I know, what a rebel. Complete edgy.

Mark's very intelligent though. He doesn't like to think that he makes the choices that he does, or believes in the things that he does, because he grew up on it, or because it's the only thing he knows, or because someone else makes decisions for him... He makes the decisions that he does because, through simple analysis, it seems to be the most practical thing to do in his situation - in order to get what he wants. He's relatively philosophical when he wants to be.

Other than that, Mark's got - if I may say so myself - a really good sense of humor. He likes all kinds of humor. Dry humor, sarcasm, dirty jokes, yo mama' jokes, all the mainstream stuff.

That's it. I'll be sculpting a more visible personality as I flesh out and Roleplay the character.

Background:
A little of Mark's history is in the Family part of this application. But, I'm not looking forward to doing a big filler on his whole childhood so I'll skip to how and why he went to California.

So instead of making an intelligent decision through simple analysis, Mark make a really shitty decision that could have ruined his life if shit hadn't hit the fan as it did around the world(as ironic as that sounds). In Mark's high school life, he met a girl that he quickly became close friends with. There was nothing intimate between them, they were just really great friends - talked all the time, completely understood each other. But before anything could have sparked, definitely not saying that Mark wanted anything to happen, she moved to California.

They kept a long-distance thing going on that lasted pretty long, until Mark's senior year when they began to grow apart a bit.

It was graduation night when Mark was celebrating his new freedom, and among the good company of friends Mark was a little buzzed. I promise, it was just a little. However, it was enough for him to make the critical decision through the encouragement of his fellow gentlemen that it would be a really great idea to take a road trip to California. In the back of his mind, he thought that he could probably revive his relationship with this girl he was sure he loved. It would just like in the movies!

Oddly enough, it was just like in the movies.

But it didn't last. Everything crashed and burned. Mark blamed himself. He blew off college and got a shitty job for this, and it all fell away. That all has nothing to do with the Mark that is now, he's never been one go about, "Woe is me! I'll always be alone! I'm a hopeless edgy romantic!" Fuck that. It doesn't control anything about him anymore, and barely did after the fallout of their relationship had set in.

.. Maybe the world deserved to burn though.

Job Before The Outbreak:
Mark wasn't that good at keeping a job. He was great at what he did when he was passionate about it, but that was rare. He was lazy. Most of the time he was unemployed, living in a shitty apartment and bouncing around with equally shitty friends in Los Angeles area. The only permanent source of income he could land were some early ASIC boards he used for mining, at which he fenced off Bitcoins when the price wasn't pump-n-dumpin' so much. It was a horrible source of income though, only bringing in pocket change. Not to mention, it usually got him into serious trouble with his landlords... Eating up all that power uselessly.

Although Mark is quite resourceful, he doesn't have any concrete experience from a job. He worked from being a waiter, to a cashier, to a PetsMart employee, to a Barnes&Noble shelf-stacking-champion... It was all useless shit.

Disability/Fear:
I know everyone typically has a balanced set of fears and problems, but Mark isn't that... Challenged. He has some small issues, like a slight case of Night-Blindness, and low blood pressure... But those are little things that everyone has(every American like me I should say). He's kind of afraid of heights, but he participated in the ROTC Raider Team and they were always doing some really awesome shit at weekend events/competitions. Repelling down huge towers was of course scary to him, but he got over it quickly and it was exhilarating. And twice a year cadets with good attendance could participate in the Black Hawk tours(fly around for like 30 minutes in a black hawk with the doors open).

High school was athletically competitive, and he did cross country track as well as wrestling for a season. Being a Raider in ROTC, he was relatively physically fit and cultivated the mentality of a physically fit, healthy-living person. But after hitting California, or should I say California hitting him, he didn't find the drive to stay fit. He's out of shape, and unprepared for an apocalypse.

Weapon of Choice:
No weapon of choice, or carried arms. He'll use anything nearby he finds practical at killing, until he finds something more permanent.

EDIT: Terminus, almost forgot.
Also, I'm really liking the Trevor-like character. Every zombie-RP needs a Trevor.
Everyone in general needs a Trevor.