Name: Berlin TempestNickname: His parents still address him by his given name (Camden), but he’d really rather you didn’t. Online, he goes by Teacup_Tempest and his followers or friends are allowed to make up nicknames based on that. If he really likes you, he might accept “Linny.”
Gender/Pronoun: Femme cis guy, he/they.
Age: 24.
Birthday: December 1st, 2000.
Sign: Sagittarius.
Gemstone: Tanzanite, blue topaz, turquoise, and blue zircon.
Blood Type: B+
Fav. Food: Kit-Kats, but he’s picky about them. If he can’t get the dark chocolate ones or one of the flavors from Japan, he doesn’t want any. (There are 300+ flavors of Kit-Kat in Japan and although he has favorites, Berlin is significantly less picky about which Japanese flavor he gets.)
Hated Food: Basically any kind of beef that isn’t in a hamburger, and he’s picky about that, too. If the beef in the burger is too fatty or greasy, you can keep it.
Occupation: Twitch streamer (mostly video games, but also does some chat and lifestyle streams), Youtuber, and online “influencer.”
Hobbies:
Video Games: If asked, Berlin will tell you that his favorite type of game is “Yes.” In reality, yes, he’ll try a lot of things at least once but he’s a bit choosier than he pretends. Regardless of game type, fantasy games win him over easily (he has only shut up about Baldur’s Gate 3 since its release because he had lore and theory vids to make about Bloodborne). Streams are frequently dedicated to Pokémon games, roguelike games (especially if they have a good story or do something weird and fun like Hades and Cult of the Lamb), FromSoft games (Bloodborne and Elden Ring are his favorites but he’s never gonna be mad at Dark Souls, Demon’s Souls, or Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice), and the Fallout series (New Vegas is his favorite but he even has positive things to say about Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel, which some other fans don’t consider canon because they disliked the game so much). MMORPGs aren’t so much his thing, but he loves other games that are meant to be played with others, like Mario Party, Super Smash Bros., and fighting games. If you didn’t want to hear his in-depth opinions about all the companion romances in every single Dragon Age or Mass Effect game—plus his case for why BioWare should also let him romance The Architect of the Works of Beauty from Dragon Age: Origins — Awakening and Saren Arterius—you should’ve said something twenty minutes ago.
Berlin just really likes video games. Do you wanna listen to his theories about weird gender stuff in FromSoft games?
My Little Pony: Specifically, Berlin enjoys customizing his own ponies. His gateway to this was watching Friendship Is Magic when he was younger and getting into the dolls. While he does also enjoy the dolls from previous generations of Ponies, he hasn’t been terribly interested in older incarnations of the cartoon and most of his lore knowledge comes from fan wikis, fan discussion forums and subreddits, lore-dive videos on youtube, etc. That’s all fun and interesting, but it’s nowhere near as interesting to him as stitching new hair into the plastic, redoing a paint job, maybe even designing a little outfit for his new Pony (see: the handful of customs he has made based on his Player Character OCs from different play-throughs of Bloodborne and New Vegas). While he sometimes takes commissions, Berlin prefers just making custom Ponies for people as gifts and having the only monetization be from streaming his process.
Fanfiction: Primarily, Berlin is a reader and he’s open to a lot of different fandoms, ships, genres, and tropes. The uniting trait in the fics he likes best is that most of them are some kind of deliberately ******** up and edgy. He likes similarly unhinged stuff outside the realm of fanfic, but in Berlin’s mind, fanfiction has no excuse for self-censorship. Nobody’s paying for it, so nobody has the right to tell you not to write your most messed up ideas to the fullest. When he gets in the mood to write, he follows his own advice. Most of his stories start with him getting a weird little idea and asking himself “Hey, wouldn’t it be ******** up if I did that to this character.” Basically, the fics he loves most and most enjoys writing will make a reader wonder whether the author is okay or not. His most frequently used tag on AO3 is “Dead Dove: Do Not Eat” and he’s very proud of that.
Occult and Esoterica: Berlin likes weird things, and from a pretty early age, he has understood that most people consider anything to do with magic, demons, folkloric and/or mythological monsters and non-human beings, etc. to be incredibly weird. Motivating him to read anything but fiction is incredibly difficult outside of research for lore-dives……unless it’s some weird occult s**t, in which case he wants it, he needs it, what’s the ISBN number again. Nestled in between his copies of miscellaneous trashy gay bodice rippers and The Man from C.A.M.P., you will find books with titles like The Bathhouse at Midnight: A Historical Survey of Magic and Divination in Russia, Ghosts And The Japanese: Cultural Experience in Japanese Death Legends, The Night Battles: Witchcraft & Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth & Seventeenth Centuries, and The Path of Shadows: Chthonic Gods, Oneiromancy, Necromancy in Ancient Greece. He is often found at different esoterica and New Age shops around town, looking for new trinkets and/or books, and he regularly works aspects of these studies into his fanfiction.
Exploring Destiny City: Despite having a very online job and being “chronically online” in many ways, Berlin does genuinely enjoy going outside and touching some grass, so to speak. Destiny City is a weird place, and as a self-professed connoisseur of weird things, Berlin wants to see as much of the weirdness as he can. In practice, this means that he’s eager to go check out little local shops or restaurants he hasn’t been to before, to wander around areas of town he doesn’t know very well just to see what he finds, or to show up for the opening of new places even if he doesn’t think he’ll like the places themselves very much. It probably doesn’t hurt that he always has his phone with him and thus, a lot of his adventures end up becoming “content” of some kind (pics on Instagram, video clips on TikTok and/or Youtube, more proper vlogs, etc.), so he can justify this hobby somewhat.
Virtues:
Enthusiastic: Berlin is a go-getter and a spitfire, easy to get invested in something and very good at motivating himself to pursue his interests. When he’s excited about something, he goes full throttle about it. If it’s something where he can’t or shouldn’t go full throttle about it, he will either try to do that, mess things up, and start over with the intent to do better this time, or listen to someone telling him not to do that and pursue the endgame goal with bubbly eagerness. Challenging things especially get him going and if he doesn’t feel challenged, he will find a way to make things more challenging for himself. In his mind, his status as a FromSoft fanboy explains everything: his favorite games are the ones where players are expected to fail multiple times over while taking on massively challenging fights, and he likes to approach real life with the same kind of attitude. If at first you don’t succeed, that’s just an opportunity for you to figure out a new strategy until something works.
Outgoing: To paraphrase Ariel, Berlin wants to be where the people are. Very social and fond of being around people, he can strike up a conversation with pretty much anyone. You have ten fingers? He has ten fingers! You should be his friend! Oh, you lost one of your fingers in an accident? That’s okay, Berlin doesn’t actually think finger counts are a good metric for basing a friendship and he has decided that he likes your vibe. He’ll still be your friend. What sorts of things do you like? Please tell him all about yourself and your interests, new friend!!
Imaginative: If you ask him, Berlin is a dreamer, and that’s a pretty fair assessment. He was the sort of kid who would follow the rules in a “color by numbers” activity but use the wrong colors, so the cute picture wound up with green bunnies eating black carrots on magenta grass. Yes, he hears what you’re saying about his idea being unrealistic, and how he probably just saw a DoorDasher dropping off an order or a babysitter leaving a job, but what *IF* he noticed somebody who’s sleeping with a person who’s already married. “The box” that you want Berlin to think inside of is no concern to him. Frankly, asking him to limit his thoughts like that means you need more whimsy in your life.
Supportive/Encouraging: Hey, bestie, are you feeling down on yourself? Well, Berlin thinks that you shouldn’t, and he’s here with a fully illustrated PowerPoint about all the reasons why you’re awesome. He commissioned an artist who’s made some channel art for him before to make pictures as beautiful and special as you are. Do you need someone to listen to your problems and tell you how strong and brave you are for getting through all that? Berlin has started asking you questions before you can even ask him to be that guy for you. Do you want advice? Uh, he can’t promise that his will be the exact right idea that you need, but his heart is in it and he’ll give you his best effort! Do you need to hear about that coworker you don’t like is a b***h who isn’t as cool and smart and fun as you? Well, here’s your favorite coffee order and Berlin is 100% ready to dish on why your workplace nemesis sucks and you are so much better than them in every way.
Flaws:
Selectively Enthusiastic: The flipside of Berlin being such a go-getting little spitfire is that, if he decides he doesn’t care about something, it is incredibly difficult to make him care about it. Yeah, okay, he hears you that it’s important and all? But it also sounds really boring and he doesn’t wanna deal with it. Getting him to take care of things he has ruled Are Not Worth His Time is at best an excruciating chore, and at worst, impossible. Even if the thing in question is in his own best interests to handle, he will blow you off, blatantly fail to listen to you about it, and procrastinate until the last possible minute (see, his taxes, which only ever get filed because his big sister keeps on him until they’re done). He is also very likely to “forget” about something you told him because he didn’t want to deal with it.
Lacks Boundaries: It’s fine that you want to keep your tragic backstory secret, Berlin thinks that’s a valid life-choice and all, but please consider: he doesn’t respect that life-choice and he is going to nag you about your tragic backstory. Hey, why do you sneak off on your own for secret meetings that you visibly go out of your way to not let anybody know about? Mind you, Berlin only knows about this because he blatantly ignored your direct and specific request for privacy and he followed you while you were sneaking off. But now there’s a new mystery about why you were sneaking off in the first place, and even though it’s objectively none of his business, Berlin wants to know what’s going on. Come on, bestie!! Tell him all the things!! Telling him you don’t want to talk about something is a crime against Berlin personally, haven’t you heard!!
If it makes up for him prying too much, Berlin will tell you all kinds of stuff you never wanted to know about his relationship with his parents, what he’s looking for in a boyfriend, his less-than-ideal school experiences from growing up, this one time at Japanese language immersion summer camp, etc. (This does not help. It never helps. Balancing out his lack of respect for your boundaries by having none of his own either mostly just annoys people, or possibly makes them concerned about why Berlin is telling stories like this with such a perky, upbeat attitude, as though they are meant to be silly and funny.)
Needy for Validation: Berlin has basically the perfect cocktail of personality traits to be an online influencer for a career, especially how much he craves validation from other people. Most ideas he has about himself are null and void until somebody else agrees with him. Does the skirt look good on him? Well, even if it feels good, he still won’t buy it until he puts a fitting room selfie on Instagram and gets at least a few hits of positive feedback about it. In addition to him being generally needy, this makes him incredibly sensitive to others’ opinions of him and eager to change his behaviors in order to make other people happy, even if he is really bad at trying to fit into the box you want him to fit into (see: literally any time when anybody asks him to respect their boundaries). Maybe he didn’t think he was doing too much in this stream, but chat says he is, so he’s going to dial it back now.
Self-Loathing: Underneath the perky, upbeat façade and ostensibly unapologetic weird little freak behavior, Berlin doesn’t like himself very much. Negative feedback gets taken to heart and internalized in ways that are difficult to shake because it agrees with how Berlin already sees himself. He prioritizes others’ needs because he feels like his needs aren’t really that important. He minimizes his own pain and puts himself in situations where he knows—or at least can reasonably expect—that he will get hurt because it’s easier to deal with externally induced pain than just feeling like garbage for no apparent reason other than “Berlin exists as a person and kinda hates this about himself.” Even working on this with a therapist has been extremely slow-going because Berlin struggles to notice his negative self-perception and challenge himself on it. Without someone helping him in the moment, most of the negative thoughts he has about himself strike him as perfectly rational.
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTIONEyes: #C7719F. Bright and attentive.
Hair: Long (down to about his waist) with some wave to it. Dark violet (something like #3D2E4E, #3B2E4C, #352946, or #3F2F51?) with a splash of soft pink (#DF96B5 or #E89DBB, maybe?) in his floppy bangs. He likes wearing it in space buns that look kinda like cat ears (very much like Koan Ayakashi and her space-buns).
Face: Well, he thinks he’s a real cutie, thanks so much for asking! (He’s not wrong: he has very delicate, doll-like features that mix very well with the cute vibes he wants to give off, and very badly with how loud and sometimes grating his voice can be.)
Skin Tone: #F6E7DA. Could stand to go outside more often, but not as pale as he was when he was younger and barely went outside at all. 100% got his clear skin from taking a Curology sponsorship deal.
Body Type: 5’8”. Slim but not too skinny. He has very nice legs and he wants you to notice them.
Clothes: He’s pretty open on styles, he just likes looking cute, kinda geeky, and kinda slutty at the same time. Short, plaid, pleated skirts are a mainstay. Owns a shockingly large amount of thigh-high socks and cat ear headbands of varying colors and materials.
