Character profiles: Jarvis

Full Name: Jarvis William Enz

Age: 30 something

Gender: Male

Appearance:
Hair: curly brown hair that seems to go many directions at once.
Eyes: gray-blue
Height: 5’ 9” tall but is sometime mistaken as taller because of the thick soled shoes and boots he favors.
Body frame/build: Quite spindly and thin. Not much to him, probably because buried in the work on the latest invention or project and frequently forgets to eat.
Nose: A very thin almost hawk-like nose.
Mouth: a very expressive mouth despite the fact he doesn’t have much of an upper lip.
Chin/Jaw: has a very strong jaw with quite a pointy chin. There’s a slight discoloration near where his jaw and right ear meet from an early lab accident. Some describe it as a star or sunburst shape that is slightly lighter than the rest of his face.
Skin: Overall, quite pale, but there are numerous old scars on his hands…mostly from lab accidents where something has gone quite wrong and other times, just a nasty knuckle scrape that healed badly.
Hands: a casual observer would not notice anything unusual about his hands. Yet, when you see him work on something, it becomes quite apparent that most of his fingers are double-jointed, especially his thumbs which almost appear as though they can bend backwards.

Clothes: Jarvis has a wide variety of mostly gray lab coats, smocks, shirts and trousers that perhaps were originally white a number of years ago. In cold or rainy weather, he’ll wear one of his two full-length leather coats. Both coats, while looking very different, each have an uncountable number of pockets, hidden flaps and zipped up areas where Jarvis can store all sorts of gadgets and miscellaneous items. On Wednesdays, no matter the weather, Jarvis always wears his bright orange wool blazer. Various inquires into what this signifies gets the usual response from Jarvis “It was a gift and I always and only wear it on Wednesdays.” Some have speculated it was a gift from his mother or an old girlfriend.

Accessories & accoutrements: Jarvis has a constantly changing inventory of gadgets and inventions, but there are three things that he always has:
• What looks like a small crude club made of brass or bronze with a small light on top is Jarvis’ most prized possession/invention. Most would take it for a weapon of some sort, but what it really is, is a crate detector. Many of the items that Jarvis has stored across Archen and abroad are hidden in crates that only he can find with his crate detector. Only the thief-takers know what this item actually is, but none knows exactly how it works.
• Coffee beans. No matter what, Jarvis has coffee beans on him. If possible, he will crush or grind the beans to make coffee. If that’s not possible, he will just chew on the beans, which can be irritating to listen to.
• His slingshot. This is really Jarvis’ only weapon he has any skill with. There is a legend about him on Mina island where the locals there say he used his slingshot to shoot down incoming arrows and almost single-handedly win the battle when a rival village attacked the one he was staying in.

Abilities: able to create a wide variety of gadgets, sometimes with relatively little planning or preparation. Specializes in magnetic and pneumatic propulsion devices. Able to calculate volumes of objects, trajectories and distances in his head and does so in a borderline compulsive way.


Other Skills:

Weaknesses/Special Afflictions: Has terrible physical/emotional reaction to chicken…refuses to eat chicken and can hardly stand the thought of chickens (more on this in bio). Despite his very adept mathematical mind, he gets lost easily. Although he creates a lot of gadgets, the failure rate of his gadgets and experiments is very high. Very stubborn, especially in cases involving technology of any sort.

Personality: Jarvis is very happy-go-lucky. In almost all cases, he’s quick with a smile and always very polite. It seems that he has incredible luck at avoiding severe injury and death. However, he has absolutely terrible luck when it comes to his inventions. If a smoke bomb were to accidentally go off, it would go off at the absolute worst time. If the thief-takers were needing absolute silence to avoid trouble, one of his inventions would start buzzing or chirping unexpectedly….you get the picture.

Location(s): Jarvis was born at an unknown location in the Dundtel province of B’Shara.

Bio – early years: Jarvis grew up in the rural Dundtel province (heck, nearly the whole province is rural, so that’s nothing special). Everyone in Dundtel is a chicken farmer or somehow, someway supports the world renowned Dundtel chicken industry.
At a very early age, Jarvis disliked the birds and tended to wander about the barn or the basement, combining multiple worn out farming tools into something new. His parents thought this was odd, but was just a phase.
A few years later, 10 year old Jarvis was adding components to tractors so that they were more fuel efficient and did things that his parents just didn’t want tractors to do…like pressing the wrong button would launch the tractor 2 feet in the air, which Jarvis thought was a “cool trick”. For that, he was told not to touch any of the farm equipment. From that time forward, Jarvis had to scrounge whatever odd bits and pieces he could from the farm or neighboring farms. When he had enough items, he set up his shop in the basement and basically stayed away from all aspects of chicken farming.
Shortly after his 18th birthday there was an incident on the farm which lead to him leaving the farm and moving to the port town of Plindt. He never really has said what it was that happened, just that it was “unfortunate”.

Bio – recent years: Since coming to Archen, Jarvis has worked on countless jobs. Many times it is some branch of the Archen government wanting him to install the latest furnace, power generator or X-ray device. Other times, heads of governments world-wide have called on him to create, improve or fix some existing technology of theirs. In one of his earliest jobs, he was installing a new coal/steam furnace in the royal palace in Taunay. Something went terribly wrong, the entire palace filled with smoke and Jarvis was chased for over 2 miles by a dozen angry palace guards brandishing their swords and cutlasses. Needless to say, the King of Taunay has yet to invite Jarvis back.
Because of Jarvis’ involvement in the cutting edge of technology, and his sharing this technology with countries other than Archen…some that are not friendly to Archen, he has been put on the espionage watch list. Archen government agents will follow Jarvis around from time to time.

I'll have a bit more detail soon. Spike, I pretty much used the outline you had for Ralkin. I like how things are shaping up so far.

I likes him... but uhm... what does espionage mean? Is is bad?

Edit: Looked it up on Wikipedia but they used even bigger words to explain it. *rolls eyes* Ya know, I think Wikipedia should be told that it tends to be 12 - 18 year olds who use it...

Um...what spies do. Getting secret information and giving it to the enemy, stuff like that.

Is my English really that good? I've always said that videogames, comics, novels and movies make you smart, but this is quite surprising...

Maledicus wrote:Um...what spies do. Getting secret information and giving it to the enemy, stuff like that.

Is my English really that good? I've always said that videogames, comics, novels and movies make you smart, but this is quite surprising...

*grin* Well, I bet you don't know what antidisestablishmentarianism means!
Nyaaaaah

anti: against
dis: the following word is supposed to decline
establishment: ...the way things are run? The structure of power?
arianism: like...philosophy of whatever the rest of the word is

Philosophy of being against the decline of the current structure of power?
*looks it up*
Pretty close, I guess, although it seems to be about one specific kind of establishment.

I like the way ye have Jarvis laid out - although ye still didn't quite say what it was about the chickens...

The double-jointedness was a good little twist
By the way, I don't know if ye noticed, but both Jarvis and Ralkin seem to have some kind of lab or experimentation background.

Oh, and yer English is just fine, mate.

Oh, I do have the details on how Jarvis became all weirded out so that he is phobic about eating chickens. I'm hoping to fit it into the actual story at some point. I didn't want to reveal that just yet.