Name: Peregrine Thomas Diver
Nickname: Perrie
Age: 18
Birthday: 13 June
Sign: Gemini (he's a triple Gemini)
Gemstone: Agate
Blood Type: AB pos
Fav. Food: Coffee. He could live on coffee alone if he had to. He drinks it with mocha-flavored coffee whitener.
Hated Food: Seafood, especially lobster. Ugh. It's mostly a texture thing.
Occupation: Jockey and exercise rider at the local horse-racing track. Schools attended: Knightside Elementary, Meadowview High (less than a year).
Hobbies: Juggling: Perrie's parents gave him a "Juggling For Kids" kit when he was seven, and he became obsessed with it until he mastered all the tricks in the book. Juggling is still his primary relaxation tool, as well as a great conversation starter. He'll often absently juggle whatever is at hand that's suitable; he always carries around some small balls of some kind, but it's more fun to just pick up random small stuff and start juggling it. He's reasonably good at it too, as one might expect after so many years of practice.
Mushrooms: Not the button kind of mushroom you put in your quiche either. Some jockeys drink, Perrie gets high. As much as he would like to deny it, magic mushrooms are a bit of a crutch for him, more due to the effect they have on his serotonin levels than for any actual physically- or psychologically-addictive qualities (of which shrooms have none). Psychoactives help him cope with the pressures of his chosen career field, and the best coping mechanism he has found so far are
Psilocybe cubensis mushrooms and other varieties of the same family. He's tried LSD, but it's far too harsh and cut with too much bad stuff, plus it's increasingly hard to get hold of. He carefully regulates his shroom intake so that he doesn't burn himself out on them, tripping only once a week or so at most. (To be honest, at first he thinks this whole senshi thing is one big hallucination. XD)
Virtues:Raging extrovert: At his heart, Perrie is a genuine people person, extroverted, social and sociable. Bouncy, hyper and wacky, one tends to either love him or want to shoot him with a tranquilizer dart. He is an outgoing person who's friendly and fun to be around, with a goofy sense of humor and no shame whatsoever. Fun is a big motivating factor for him; he believes life should be about having fun, and he can manage to find the fun in just about any task or situation. As a performer on the stage of Life, Perrie is on all the time; he loves to play to a crowd, and to him, the world is his audience. He's a happy, zany little weirdo who just wants to be everyone's friend.
Independent: Perrie has managed for himself pretty much his entire life, having been left to his own devices for much of his childhood. He's almost like a benign male Pippi Longstocking: strange, fond of horses, and independent as hell. He'd rather do a thing by himself than ask for or accept help; well, in truth, it's more that he'll just plow ahead and do the thing before help is offered or ignoring any offered assistance. He doesn't have an agent, acting on his own to negotiate rides at the track. And if he doesn't end up with a ride, he's perfectly content helping out in the stable area, grooming and exercising the horses and even mucking out stalls.
Wise: Despite his young age, Perrie has that kind of naive wisdom that comes from having an unconditional faith in humanity (here naive = unsullied and non-cynical). He faces life's challenges with energy and optimism, which almost always ensure a positive outcome. Perhaps it's his relative lack of life experience, perhaps it's the unique path he's chosen to walk, perhaps it's the mushrooms talking; but everything he does, he does with an undying optimism and hope. His brand of crazy wisdom tends to shock and/or surprise those he's talking to, but it also tends to get them to thinking about their problems in different ways, and coming up with clever solutions.
Horse sense: Which in this context means "common sense". For all his wackiness, Perrie keeps a level head in a crisis situation, and tends to be able to see clear to the heart of a matter and offer sometimes blunt, matter-of-fact opinions and solutions. This helps calm his allies and allows them to think about the problem in a sensible way. He doesn't freak out himself, at least not that he allows to show; he usually only has a breakdown after the fact, once the situation has been resolved. He also has
literal horse sense, a calming presence around horses. As a jockey, he's never had a horse flip out beneath him or throw him. He loves his big four-legged freakout machines, and more to the point understands them like few jockeys do.
Flaws: Idiosyncratic to an extreme: Perrie is a deeply odd young man. He's his own little subculture, and this sometimes costs him in terms of potential friendships and rides at the racetrack, simply because he doesn't look or act like the other jockeys. He is also a non-linear thinker -- his mental processes go off in all directions almost constantly, but he can follow all the different trains of thought in his head and come back to where he started, and can pick right up where he left off usually without missing a beat. He actually suffers from raging Attention Deficit Disorder, which went largely undiagnosed in his youth; before he began self-medicating with magic mushrooms, he would have lost most of those thought patterns and forgotten what he was talking about.
Contrary little control freak: Stubborn as a small mule, Perrie prefers to be in control of his own destiny, thank you very much. As control freaks go, though, he's not all that terribly interested in controlling the actions of others; he believes everyone is ultimately capable of making their own choices in life. And that includes him. Naturally contrary and rebellious, Perrie will often deliberately do the opposite of what someone wants him to, especially if he's pissed off at them, just to be a s**t. (Hint: Best way to get him to do something? Tell him he can't or shouldn't do it.) He tends to ride a race how he wants to, sometimes despite trainer's orders. They've pretty much learned not to argue with him.
Naive: Perrie's relative lack of life experience have made him more than a bit naive about the world (and here naive = ignorant and lacking experience). He can be gullible and easily fooled, with an overactive imagination that has him coming up with all manner of wild over the top negative scenarios about things. Despite his career path, he has no drive, no real ambition to take it further, like riding in the Kentucky Derby or anything like that. He has absolutely no inhibitions and no internal governor over his actions or his words -- this sometimes gets him in trouble, as one can imagine. Far too impetuous for his own good, he just doesn't know when to shut it off and toe the line. He has the relative attention span of a gnat.
Short Man Complex: Being little and cute has a lot going for it, and the vast majority of the time Perrie deals with his lack of vertical stature just fine. It's when he gets talked down to or treated like a child or something less than an intelligent human being because they won't see past his small size that it becomes annoying. There is more than a bit of Short Man Complex at work here, that tendency of some small men to compensate for their lack of height with aggressive behavior. With Perrie, he becomes loud and abrasive, and will stomp around like a little bantam rooster with a chip on his shoulder the size of a plank, practically begging for someone to knock it off. He got into a lot of fights in school over his height.
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION
Eyes: Amber-gold, wide and more round than almond-shaped, topped with straight, heavy dark eyebrows.
Hair: Bright eye-searing neon fuschia-pink, worn in a shaggy shoulder-length mess that hangs in his face constantly.
Face: Mostly round in shape, he has fairly soft androgynous features, a straight nose and a slightly pouty, full-lipped mouth. His left nostril is pierced with a simple stud. He has a fair complexion and tends to tan rather than burn.
Clothes: Dresses like a thrift store tatterdemalion; his basic look is part raver, part punk and part street urchin, baggy and oversized and worn. He typically wears ripped jeans or baggy Hot Topic pants held up with suspenders so his boxers don't hang out, mismatched Converse All-Stars (he has several pair, all of them mixed up colorwise), random faded t-shirt, sometimes worn over a long-sleeved t-shirt, and an old newsboy cap. He adds a fleece-lined denim jacket, ratty fingerless gloves, and a long multicolored knit scarf when it gets cold. His favorite color is orange, because it clashes painfully with his hair. (
Here is a sketch!)
When he's working in the stables, he makes sure to wear wellies over his regular shoes and the rattiest jeans he owns; for exercising horses, he swaps out the jeans for jodhpurs and riding boots. He wears the standard jockey gear when he's got a ride: silks, a helmet and goggles, body armor, close-fitting pants and riding boots.
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