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Name: Janice Earnestine Fitzpatrick

Nickname: Jan-jan, Jan, or Janny.

Age: 17

Birthday: October 31

Sign: Scorpio

Gemstone: Opal

Blood Type: I DUN REMEMBER

Fav. Food: Stuff labeled as "fresh," "homegrown" and "organic," things made from higher-priced and fancy-labelled ingredients. She's someone who's willing to spend the extra bit of money on quality and would probably make for an expensive dinner date. Has a particular fondness for Mediterranean cuisine and other dishes that give her an excuse to throw giant chunks of tomato and pepper into.

Hated Food: Anything cheap or junky. Janice can't stand cafeteria food and isn't too keen on fast food either. Frozen anything is right out, and she casts a wary eye to the word "instant" unless it's tea or a hot drink. The only time you'll ever see her touching a microwave is to quickly defrost something or reheat some leftovers.

School: Meadoview

Hobbies:
Board Games - While it's a decidedly a strange thing to have a passion for, Janice has a notable one for board games. From backgammon to Connect-4 to Candyland to Risk, she owns at least one set of nearly every game under the sun, and it's unusual for her to not have at least one or two of them set up and in progress at any given point in time. Though she's very practiced in all kinds, the ones she enjoys the most and plays the best are intensive strategy ones: she's won several local tournaments in chess and Scrabble, and for the sake of a new challenge she's recently picked up and started teaching herself the workings of Mahjong (and has already started sneering and scoffing at people who think Mahjong is a tile matching game for the PC).

Basically, a surefire way to get Janice to associate with you is to sit across from her at a table and put a board game in front of her. It's a very rare circumstance in which she'll refuse to play a game with anyone, or stop it prematurely.

Collecting - As said above, Janice possesses at least one set of every game under the sun, and the keywords there are at least one. She's on the lookout for every edition of Monopoly that exists, owns chess sets with themes ranging from the Simpsons to DC vs. Marvel (she refuses to play Marvel side) to the Civil War, and worse yet, her hoarding habits do not stop with her collection of board games. One set of shelves in her room is dedicated to an enormous unholy legion of windup toys, she has enough snowglobes that you could melt them all down and make one big enough to fit Meadowview High's entire student body in, she has a somewhat enviable and well-kept stack of DC comics she dutifully never pulls out and reads; really, the only thing she never developed an interest in collecting at some point in her life was the tried-and-true postage stamp. She literally has a collection of collections, and will occasionally flit between flea markets to buy, sell and trade for new and lost interests alike.

Billiards - When regarding someone like Janice, one would probably, quickly assume that any spectator sport she'd be involved in wouldn't be an outdoorsy one -- and they would be right. While she'll willingly have a go at other breakroom games like table tennis and darts, the pace and careful calculations of pool are what she prefers the most and has the most difficult time getting bored of. To be honest, the main reason she likes it is that, sans the predictable structure of tiles, it plays out fundamentally like a board game, requiring strategy and turn-by-turn planning and some capacity to anticipate what will happen next -- you just happen to move the pieces around by smacking a ball into them with the aid of a polished stick. Sign her up.


Virtues:
Passionate - Janice tries to pride herself as being some sort of Vulcan -- emotionless, logical and cool-headed -- and, ironically, one of her best qualities is the fact that she isn't one at all. When she devotes herself to something, she genuinely means it, invests all her power and untold countless hours of time into it. While she might outwardly not seem like someone you can count on, she actually is Someone You Can Count On by virtue of how impassioned she gets about whatever she is being depended on for. This makes her equal parts intensely loyal and intensely dependable: she's a classic example of someone who tries their damnedest to not give a s**t, but the amount of s**t she actually gives is enough to affect her actions.

Driven - Janice will pass Go. Janice will collect two hundred dollars. Janice will own Boardwalk and Park Place and have hotels erected on both, because Janice Fitzpatrick does not take failure as an option. Janice has lofty goals and high standards and the motivation to meet and live up to them; her willpower is a bullet train with a clear destination set in mind. She works it harder, makes it better, does it faster until it makes her stronger, she has no room in her daily planner for giving up and no tolerance for half-assing or good-enoughing. Being the best and being successful is something she's aware takes a lot of work, and she is ready and willing to do all the work that's required for it. There's a somewhat imposing, but very solid air of confidence about her that puts a degree of authority in her words and actions; she's someone who can be trusted to Get s**t Done.

Nobody Expects The Janice Inquisition - It's not to say that she's a human lie detector or cold reader -- that takes years of training and experience that she does not possess -- but Janice is an extremely difficult person to bullshit by virtue of critical thinking skills. She has a natural tendency towards observing her surroundings meticulously and carefully: she takes nothing at face value if she has reason to doubt it, and this applies very readily towards the words of others. A lie can pass by her unnoticed just like it can anyone else if she knows nothing to the contrary, but when she's on the hunt for information she picks up on attempts to bluff or distract her away from the topic very quickly. She doesn't hide the fact she knows you're trying to weasel away from giving a straight answer, and often attempts to press until you do.

All My Ducks In A Row - There are obsessive, meticulous levels of organization and planning in virtually everything Janice does, from the upkeep of her personal space to school assignments to her chess gambits. She possesses the brand of spatial thinking that enables her to be utterly horrifying with Starcraft and pretty much every game ever created by Sid Meier, and can apply it pretty flexibly. Pattern detection and prediction is something she finds intrinsically interesting, and as such she has an everyday tendency towards trying to find patterns in everything and creating ones when organizing her belongings -- in other words, this is the Janice Is Good At Board Games And Strategizing trait. She goes very in-depth and always tries to think three metaphorical moves ahead; however, this only really works if whatever she's dealing with has some sort of predictability to it.


Flaws:
Under Arrest For Not Being Fun - Janice is a grouch. Not only that, but she puts obvious effort into being one. She's overly concerned with other people taking her seriously, and often ends up being such a stick in the mud that it turns her into a killjoy or earns her more estrangement than respect; she tries to be the straight man in a group and ends up looking sillier than the people goofing off. In some circles she can be thought of as a bit of a workaholic, since she has it in her head that putting your nose to the grindstone is the formula for being mature -- and when you're mature, you have no time or desire to come out and play. This is not Silly Time, it is Work Time. She's the one who kills Funbot with her laser eyes, or at least stands around with her arms crossed and a brooding look on her face while her peers are having a good time: she's Bert, she's Snape, she's Squidward Tentacles. Isn't, couldn't, didn't, wouldn't; yes, now go away.

Giant Goddamned Snob - This trait does what it says on the tin: Janice is a giant, goddamned snob. She possesses the coffeehouse intellectual pretentiousness of someone who considers themselves outside of and above the social norm, does the emo kid scoffing at capitalism-controlled sheeple and thinks she has a unique perspective because she doesn't use the word "sheeple" for it. She's someone who will go out of her way to try some overly-advertised new product just so she can justifiably say that it sucks, and skim over the fact that advertisers are expecting to glean some of their revenue from people doing exactly that. Her speaking vocabulary is full of big fancy words in order to sound like a sophisticated, independent free thinker. She genuinely enjoys freeform jazz music. She's one of the sort who won't go to bed at a reasonable hour when someone is wrong on the Internet.

Issue-Avoidant - As hinted at above, Janice is extremely, futilely driven to Not Care. She sees any sign of emotion in herself as a sign of personal weakness, and she attempts to circumvent it by maintaining a stoic outward appearance or rerouting anything she might be feeling into frustration she can channel into something productive. She possesses a host of issues and worries she is trying to pretend do not exist, and so she distracts herself with microscopic details in school assignments and half a dozen simultaneous board games in order to not have to think about them.

Intensely Creepy And Creepily Intense - As much as she tries to put up a Vulcanesque facade of being calm and coolheaded, Janice is really one of the least calm and coolheaded people you will meet. She is running full-speed and full-tilt and full-throttle all the time, and is so emotionally wound up with everything she has a drop of investment in that she has a high risk of making a personal issue out of virtually anything and everything. Taking a chill pill is not a concept in her mental database. Neither is stopping and smelling the roses. She has virtually no capacity to relax in any sense of the word; she doesn't want to waste her time or feel like she's making a fool out of herself, and thus keeps on at a mile a minute way past the point where it's sensible to do so. Failure is really not an option. Productivity must never wane, she must always operate at full capacity, she is pressuring herself very heavily to be a machine. This makes her a bit obsessive, a bit hot-blooded, very defensive and somewhat disturbing to be around sometimes.




Micromacromanager - Details, details, details -- Janice is obsessed with these, and she has a gift for not letting them blind her completely to the big picture they make up. Whether it's from literal years' worth of time spent playing board games or some sort of inherent ability, she makes for a fantastic strategist due to her tendency to mentally break things apart, put them back together, and consider them from every possible angle in successive rapidfire. She thinks with a great deal of speed, accuracy and precision, can build up complex mental maps and effectively determine how all its landmarks and their characteristics contribute to the greater whole. This isn't an infallible trait by any means, things will slip past her radar just like it can with anyone else, but it does enable her to be utterly horrifying with Starcraft and pretty much every game ever created by Sid Meier. [***]

Interimpersonal - She's no social butterfly, she's no party animal, she's far too stiff and stony to really let herself loosen up most of the time. However, a cocktail party or business gathering would be a different story, as would any competition where your facial expression could make or break a game. In her own way Janice is good with people; not from any natural-born charisma but with a carefully practiced capacity to know what to say and how to conduct herself. Where many might charm themselves through a conversation, she strategizes her way through them. She picks her words carefully, watches body language like a hawk, can put up good facades and create convincing bluffs. It's a shame she doesn't play poker, and possibly a good thing her career aspiration isn't in politics.

Spitting Cobra - Anger that isn't properly bottled ends up fizzing up and out and getting thrown in people's faces. It isn't dishonest to say that sometimes, frankly, Janice can be more than a little mean. Sometimes, she's dangerously unafraid of saying exactly what's on her mind, and sometimes she deliberately forms her words in such a way that they'll sting when they hit your ears. She's freely caustic to people she doesn't care about or have some sort of respect for, and honestly a bit of a classical bully where her malice is concerned: the bring-you-down-to-bring-me-up formula very much applies to her here, as she gets a temporary sense of empowerment out of getting the reaction she wants to see.

That's Not Always Logical, Captain - Destiny City is not a game board. There isn't always going to be a predictable course for everything, and people do not have the limited behavior sets of game pieces and programmed AI. Janice tends to overestimate how well her Master Plans anticipate what can happen: she places her metaphorical pieces with the most practical course she can think of in mind, without fully considering that what might happen isn't always going to be practical. She can only predict so much, and isn't very prepared for the unpredictable -- even a backup plan for a backup plan is going to have its fallibility. Her intellectual strengths only go so far in dealing with individuals who follow rules she can form expectations out of. When circumstances get more unpredictable and chaotic she's at a bit of a loss, and reacts by getting a bit chaotic and unpredictable herself. This usually does not end well.

A couple of things!

Well, okay, a couple means two -- a trio of things, then. biggrin

1) You seem to have forgotten a nickname or two, Fitzmini. I'm so disappointed. sad

2) I'm not sure "Guarded" is the word that best describes what you've put in that paragraph. Given you've said it's not just obvious, but "sadly obvious," when Janice is upset about something, it may be true that she's trying to be guarded, but it's not true that she's succeeding at it! A better word for this might be "Defensive," or the less-encompassing "Avoidant" or "Bottled" or "Proud" or "Insecure" -- I tend to like Defensive because it's an umbrella that covers the others fairly well as they apply to Janice.

3) Except in the case of practiced con artists, I have a lot of trouble buying into characters who "watch body language" and win at conversations accordingly. Body language pretty much comes in two kinds: the kind that often only trained professionals (or professional con men) can read, and the kind that's so easy a caveman could do it. Bluffing well and reading people well are two separate things, and while someone who's as intelligent and insecure as Janice probably has good experience at bluffing at looking confident, someone who's as defensive and attempts to be as self-distancing as Janice wouldn't necessarily have the same facile ability to read people and know what they want to hear.

What I worry about here, in conjunction with her "micromacromanager" especially, is a character who's a bit OP in her character interactions -- if she's good at looking confident, and good at reading people, and would make, as you imply, a scarily good politician, and on top of that is also very very intelligent and good at managing details, and on top of that also is very decisive and thinks well on their feet and is good at putting puzzles together, well -- all I can ask is, why isn't she ruling the world yet?

In general I'm struggling to see where her failings are as a manager at all: she's intelligent enough to have brilliant ideas, critical enough to have the drive to be creative and independently-thinking, amazing at handling all the tiny details and perfecting a plan, and intuitive and decisive enough not to waste any time or spin any wheels in rolling out or executing that plan. I think what I'm looking for is, Janice has flaws, I'm not sure I'm getting a clear impression of what her weakness is -- so I'd like to get a better idea of what you're envisioning there!

Alright. Fixed her up a bit: replaced her smartievirtues to focus more on a couple main strengths instead of making her out to be I AM EVIL CHESSMASTERMIND RAARRR, and wrote up a new flaw to reflect on the weakness side of said smartievirtues. The point of Giant Goddamned Snob is covered well enough with her grouchiness flaw that I didn't really need it, so I got rid of it.

Basically, what I'm trying to get across is that she's super businesslike, GETS s**t DONE, is respectable when it comes to professional interactions and competitions -- however, she is stuck in Business Mode, is chronically and somewhat deliberately unfun (Srs Bsns Syndrome), is (also deliberately) not in touch with herself or others emotionally, generally tries to be Spock and fails at it in some respects.