InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "Who is this? I HAVE NO BEARD!!"

Diondre Cassius Laurent (bokor) wrote,
@ 2009-06-10 22:51:00

C H A R A C T E R • P O R T I O N

NAME: Diondre Cassius Laurent
ALIAS: The White King
NICKNAMES: If someone of his religious community wishes to address him, they usually use 'Bokor'. It's their best bet of getting what they want from him. He'll tolerate 'Dion', but only from close friends.
ALLIANCE: Russians, but can be flexible.
EXPLANATION: Diondre had the fortune of being born into a very unique position in life as the son of the ex-Prime Minister of Haiti. Let's just say the power of having diplomatic immunity, even if it means next-to-nothing here, is a great motivator for a man who wants to keep up the luxury he's been used to all his life. He's perfectly capable of reflecting what's expected of him on a professional level to any and all who are willing to listen (something he's done since he started getting into trouble as a young boy in Haiti) but he's also willing to do whatever it takes to protect his family, his interests, and (more recently) his money. 'Entitled' sums up how he feels about his societal position nicely.

AGE: 39
BIRTHDATE: April 21, 1970. Taurus.

"Now, about the subject of money-the bull and his money are seldom parted. Not every Taurean is a millionaire, but you won't find many of them standing in line for free soup. Taurus likes to build empires slowly and surely. He starts with a solid foundation, then gradually adds a story at a time, until he's built a stable business and a bank account with muscles. Oddly, Taurus likes to accumulate power, along with cash, but simply for the sensual enjoyment of possessing it. They often turn over the action to subordinates. Just knowing the power is there along with the dollars seems to satisfy the Taurean need for security. Why should he be bothered with the effort of manipulating all the strings? There are Capricorns and Cancerians around to do that, while he snoozes, smells a daisy or eyes the pretty girls. It's enough that everybody knows who owns the pasture. Sooner or later, money will come to Taurus, and it usually sticks like glue when it does. The bull prizes his cash and his possessions as he does his family, but he's not stingy.

The reason your boss was so nice and unruffled when you typed that letter, made those mistakes in the report and lingered so long over your lunch hour, was not because he's a nice, shaggy bear pushover. Nor was it because he's too shy and timid to express his wishes or exert his authority. Frankly, he didn't see any point in embarrassing you by making a big fuss over one or two or even a few goofs. He figured you had enough common sense (remember that phrase) not to repeat yourself like a broken record. He decided to watch you patiently to see if you were practical enough to profit by past errors on your own. Aye! There's the rub! His patience was carefully calculated toward a definite purpose-to test you, and to give you a chance to prove your mettle. He admires people who learn the knack of disciplining themselves. He's a self-made man. Why shouldn't you be? He's willing to give you the opportunity.

Taurus seldom worries, frets or chews his nails. He can pout and brood when things don't suit his fancy, but he's not the nervous, twitchy type. It's his nature to be stoic, and take things in his stride, and nothing really alters this basic tendency."
OCCUPATION: Chief Executive Officer of Phedre Pharmaceuticals. They develop and buy the rights to new drugs.

APPEARANCE: Diondre enjoys expensive, regal colours like red and purple, but only as accents to the rest of his wardrobe. Being a professional means that he has to keep up professional appearances to the rest of the world - that means expensive suits, the latest technology, and high-end luxuries like cigars imported from countries that shouldn't be importing to New Orleans in the first place. He keeps his shoes highly polished and his beard meticulous. His dark skin is always well-moisturized and his nails are shiny and well-kept (three manicures a week, thank you very much). He is known to don the 'power tie' during important meetings with the Board of Directors and is not at all above name-dropping in order to intimidate his competitors.

The only time that his sense of style crosses over into its true 'zone' is when he's preforming a vodou ritual or invoking the spirits - then he will be covered with anything from spiritually-blessed chalk to ... you really don't want to know.
DISTINGUISHING MARKS: He wears a very old, very worn fetish around his neck on a length of thick leather. This fetish is constructed mainly of cowrie shell, hand-twisted twine, steel, and a sun-bleached bone covered in dark stains of blood. It's usually kept under the collar of his dress shirt, but it remains on him always -- even when he's in the shower. Needless to say that he changes the length of leather often enough that it doesn't start to do anything offensive like smell. More often than not he's fidgeting with a platinum-monogrammed lighter.

Diondre's left heel bears a long, thin scar that he received just before his father was removed from power in Haiti -- from a rival politician's goon. It took him weeks to walk normally after that little incident. The top of his left foot has a small bullet scar. He also has a tattoo of a man with three horns on his left shoulder - Bosou Koblamin, a loa who protects his followers during their travels at night and is capable of defeating any enemy. Call it a ... good luck charm. Just in case.
PLAYED BY: Djimon Hounsou

LIKES: Vodou, his parents and sister, money, yams, fur, black velvet, exotic fruit, knives, business meetings, being pretentious, speaking French in front of people he knows don't speak French, fear in the eyes of someone he considers 'prey', being a sneaky bastard.
DISLIKES: Guns, laziness, repeated unnecessary mistakes, things (and people) that are easy to break, cheaply made furniture, sexual censorship.
GOALS: To discover a new and potent drug ... and then to use it against his enemies.
FEARS: Losing his parents and sister. When he was a young and somewhat more vulnerable child and his father was nearly killed being removed as Prime Minister, Diondre realized how important his family was to him. He also doesn't like the idea of going bankrupt because of the Board of Directors making a stupid decision.
SECRETS: He enjoys pain and blood, but he is so reserved that he rarely shows his pleasure of such things.

He is still in love with the mysterious woman from his past and often sees her ghost - only his parents know this. If he sees her when he is in company that is not his family, he tenses his jaw and bites on his tongue until he has to squeeze his eyes shut. When he opens them again, she's usually gone.

Usually.
DETAILED PERSONALITY: It's terribly hard to ruffle Diondre no matter the situation that he's in. It isn't that he isn't affected by the day-to-day stresses that everyone else is -- it's just that he's far better at ignoring them and realizing that the bigger picture is, in the long run, what matters. As a result, he tends to take foibles from his underlings in stride as long as their mistakes aren't repeated and they don't cost him too much stability. He is what most people consider a 'strong' personality - quick to concisely voice his opinion with as few words as possible. It tends to make him intimidating to those who ramble on. They aren't his problem, after all, since he's clearly better than them. If they can't hold their tongue, how can they stand as a real threat against him?

He is slow and methodical when it comes to most anything. He makes sure that he has a solid base to climb up on before he starts reaching for new heights, but rest assured that he will reach them once he sets his eyes on them. He takes his time and enjoys whatever it is that he decides to do: sometimes this is sipping a cup of coffee and sometimes it's peeling layers of skin off an enemy informant. Diondre isn't the sort of man that you want to cross without being prepared to face the consequences. He loves control -- he takes care of his own financial profile and cleans his own flat. This isn't because he's too cheap to hire a maid (for that would be unseemly in the eyes of himself and others) but that he prefers not to have to explain why his red carpet is wet with blood first thing in the morning to some incompetent immigrant bitch. Hypocrisy? What hypocrisy?

Diondre is fiercely protective of his family and his financial interests. He will go to whatever lengths possible in order to ensure the safety of both (although his family is more important to him on a core level). He is very close with his father and has great respect for him: anyone who comments on his father's political defeat usually finds themselves in an unpleasant situation fairly quickly. When something does affect him emotionally it often threatens to take over his life: the first time he fell in love he was ready to move heaven and earth for the woman. Unfortunately for him, his father used his superior common sense to get them out of the country and when he returned, the woman was quite dead. Diondre was devastated and resolved to keep himself romantically at a distance from all other people from that point on if he could possibly help it.

So far it's stuck in the literal sense: he hasn't found himself enamored with a man or a woman in a rather long time. This is probably because those that he bothers to date have the personalities of wet mops or prickly cacti. When he is making love he is intense, focused only on the task (and person) at hand. One-night stands have become terrifyingly practical for him since the people that he sleeps with often find his intensity either overwhelming or deliciously addictive -- either way, he doesn't usually want to keep them around.

He considers his vodou very artistic in itself, but since he keeps that on the down-low for the most part (in that he doesn't openly practice in front of others, but everyone knows about his talent) he feels the need to supplement his art with those of others: he has warehouses filled with expensive paintings that will more than likely never make it into his home. He spent far too much money making sure that his flt was modern and minimalistic for him to ruin the 'tone' of the place by putting things up on the walls. Once or twice he's tried his hands at painting, but he's inevitably ended up throwing too much paint onto the canvas and producing nothing but a pile of brownish slop.

PARENTS: Julius Laurent (former Prime Minister of Haiti) & Naomi Laurent (nee Lafonde)
SIBLINGS: One sister, still living in Haiti. She's six years younger than him and her name is Quanesha.
EXTENDED FAMILY: He's got a few uncles strewn about the globe, but doesn't bother to contact them unless he needs a connection in a new place.
SEXUALITY: Bisexual -- Openly so.
SIGNIFICANT OTHER: To be determined.

FIVE OR MORE IMPORTANT EVENTS IN THEIR LIFE:
• His father almost died, once. He had been visiting a small village on the southern border of Haiti when he'd been attacked by a rattlesnake. His mother spent the whole night praying and she'd made his sister and him sit next to her as she did so. A man, very plain and sombre, had come in to visit his father and the next day, he was improving. Diondre hadn't known at that point what the man was doing in their small hut, but he had known that the man was the reason his father hadn't died. This event served to strengthen both his ties to his family and his ties to his religion.

• When he was eight, he followed his father to a 'private meeting' that he wasn't supposed to know about. What he ended up witnessing was a business exchange between his father and the bokor of a neighbouring Haitian village. His father had paid the man to find the daughter of a rival politician and turn her into a zombi. By doing so, he would force his rival to back down for the governor's position that he was vying for. It was at that point that Diondre began to understand that you could get whatever you wanted in life if you were creative enough with the way that you went about getting it. Diondre confronted his father and made him promise that he would be able to train under the bokor. When he was twelve, the training started. He proved to be an able student.

• After an incident in America involving an underage teenage girl and about an ounce of cocaine when he was nineteen, Diondre discovered the power of diplomatic immunity. More importantly, he discovered how easy it was to abuse diplomatic immunity. The world was his oyster and its countries couldn't do a damned thing to stop him from taking all its delicious, sweet insides from them. He could make all the connections he needed to make it to the top of the financial ladder in the underhanded, subversive ways that he loved.

• His father being removed as Prime Minister of Haiti was both the best and worst day of his life. Not knowing whether his father was safe was agonizing for Diondre, but once he was assured that his father was safe ... he realized that he was no longer tethered to Haiti by his familial rope. That isn't to say that he doesn't visit Haiti anymore -- indeed, when he does visit, it is mostly to provide locals with the much-needed talents of a bokor of his caliber. By this time, he'd collected enough favors to get himself pushed onto the Board of Directors for Phedre Pharmaceuticals. He moved the family to a suburb just outside New Orleans and made sure that their estate would be taken care of at home by a trusted group of associates, then moved into his own chic condo in the White Square to begin his struggle for rule. After all, being the son of an ex-Prime Minister means that topping his father would be a substantial task indeed.

• Just before he moved to the city, Diondre met a young woman at one of his church's ceremonies who completely entranced him. She was beautiful, full of energy and life, and most of all - she impressed him with her religious devotion. She was possessed regularly by the loa and was a favorite of the priest. Despite his best efforts, she never returned his affections. During his first visit home after leaving, Diondre discovered that she had been killed in the aftermath of his father's removal, along with several other prominent members of the church. He spent months finding out the identities of the killers and turning their loved ones into his personal zombi associates. Needless to say, he felt that his revenge was as complete as it could be. He still keeps one of the sisters of the traitors as his somewhat dozy secretary.

RANDOM FACTS:
• The fetish that he wears around his neck was made by the bokor that he trained underneath. The bone that is so tightly encased in metal and cowrie shell was removed from a man who betrayed his father by Diondre himself. He cut off all the man's fingers joint by joint, cleaned them in front of him, and then chose his favorite for the fetish. He considers it a very important protective charm and never lets it out of his sight or off his person. Yes, it's that important.

• While Diondre is capable of several ritual powders as a bokor, his specialty is 'Zombi Powder'. It's derived primarily of ground puffer fish, marine toad, hyla tree frog, dried grasses, and spiders. After these ingredients are mixed he pours human blood over them, dries them (using a food dehydrator) and then mixes them with finely ground glass. The powder is most frequently sprinkled over the threshold of the door where the victim is living. Haitian vodouns believe that the bokor captures the victim's ti bon ange, the part of their soul connected to an individual. This is what creates a zombie. When the person is fully affected they appear to be clinically dead and are usually abandoned by the family -- then Diondre moves in to take the zombie home and drugs them heavily with a plant called datura. Datura causes fever, hallucinations, amnesia, and a generally detached state of mind. As long as the person is drugged regularly, Diondre can convince them to do most anything he wants.

Most of the zombis that he creates are sent back to Haiti to work with his close friends on his ancestral estate.

• Since the death of the woman that he believed was meant to be his completing half, Diondre has not had any serious relationships. He keeps himself detached from the women (and men) that he sees, and has a tendency to date boring, flat people with no personalities. If he's bored, he can't possibly fall for them and risk having to lose them at a later date. Because Haitian Vodou is an ecstatic religion rather than one focused on sacred reproduction, Diondre has no reason to hide the fact that he is sexually interested in both men and women.

• He donates exorbitant amounts of money to charity anonymously, especially family support charities. Just because he might one day be enemies with someone does not mean that they don't deserve a good family foundation. It's part of his religion, but also part of his vodoun beliefs.

• Diondre is fluent in Creole (although he speaks this mostly with his family), French, and English. He's trying to pick up Russian, but it's slow going for now.

O O C • P O R T I O N

NAME: Lettie
CONTACT: Lettie347@gmail.com , Lettie347 (AIM)
ARE YOU 18 OR OVER?: Yes.
SAMPLES: She was the most beautiful woman that Diondre had ever seen, and he'd seen a lot of women -- American, Chilean, African, Chinese -- and this woman beat them all. It wasn't even because she had the best features that he'd seen, not really. It was the way that she was moving tonight, barefoot in the dust and writhing in spiritual ecstacy. She was more enflamed, more singularly sexual than any woman he'd seen before -- her devotion astounded him. Some part of him was suddenly terrified -- what if this entire moment was just a gift given to him by the loa, a single perfect moment of beauty?

When she laughed at him, suddenly an earthly being again, he was reassured that it hadn't been a dream. He smiled, confident on the outside as he was nervous on the inside, and introduced himself.

"The Prime Minister's son," she had said to him, eyes suddenly dancing with mischief, "isn't that something." She leaned in, her lips hovering mere inches above his, before she whispered, "and by that, of course, I mean 'isn't that terribly boring'."

She turned on her heels and walked away from him into the crowd.

No matter how many times he replayed that moment in his mind it never stopped stinging. Rejection from someone who he was sure was meant to be with him forever was painful, but the fact that she was now long-dead was what really twisted his insides up.

He'd made the men who killed her pay, but it still hadn't seemed like enough. Nothing would ever be enough, but he could distract himself with shiny, pretty possessions and concentrating on gaining power until he was so consumed with his own superiority that he could stop thinking about that woman's eyes.