AU character info

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 18:55:27 GMT

Background

Like his OU counterpart, this AU Erik started out with the gypsies performing magic tricks and feats of ventriloquism: he eventually took up with a travelling circus, but not as a freak, because at this stage in his life he was not deformed. He was an animal wrangler, performing acts with the circus beasts and looking after them. He had run away from his home after the tragic death of his mother. His father had refused to nurture the boy's talent for creativity and music, instead choosing for him an apprentice career making barrels with a local wine merchant. Erik fled this fate to take up a travelling life with the gypsies and then the circus.
One of the circus lions was in fact a werelion, a shapeshifter, who had hidden within the circus to escape a murder charge years ago and never managed to leave. This werelion eventually went mad in his captivity, becoming more like a dumb beast than a thinking, sentient being, and one day attacked and mauled Erik severely during a performance. The shapeshifter was shot by the ringmaster and after death his corpse regained its human form, giving away the horror that was to come for Erik.
Erik's face was badly scarred down one side, and added to this trauma was the slow and sick relisation that he had been infected by the werelion's curse and was now able to take the shape of a lion himself. He couldn't get near the other circus animals, who tried to attack him constantly as he was no longer the human they had known. Discovering Erik's condition, the circus owner tried to imprison him in the freak show as an Animal Boy, but Erik, betrayed by his circus family and terrified of ending up the same as the previous werelion or worse, refused. During the ensuing argument an attempt was made to tie Erik up in the lion's cage, and Erik killed the ringmaster in his fight to escape.
His flight at last brought him (after a long series of adventures which in most part mirror Leroux's version of Erik's travelling years and time with the Shah in Persia, Constantinople and surrounding) to the Opera House in Paris, which he customised and set up home in, still nursing his bitterness and his lion curse sorely. He has lived there ever since. Shows and people have come and gone, and Erik has made his presence known among them, either as the masked phantom or as the shadowy big cat who prowls above in the delicate flies and below in the caverns.
He has not known a Christine, nor a Raoul, not have any of the opera managers in his universe yet dared to rent out Box Five. These things are perhaps yet to come for him...

His loneliness and bitterness is not helped by the fact that his supernatural status as a shapeshifter has increased his life-span. Where Erik comes from it is now the mid-twentieth century and he is still alive, still looking relatively young, and importantly still lonely, angry at the way he has been treated and very slightly mad.
In his time at the Opera, he has taken in only two protogees: one a singer, one another werelion who needed help to adjust to the transformation. Both of these left him in bad circumstances, leaving Erik even further disallusioned and distrustful.

Mannerisms
Erik has a habit of talking to himself, is uneasy in crowds or in public where he feels exposed, and can become very angry at seemingly trivial things. He trusts people very unwillingly. He is capable of being very generous when he believes the cause is good, especially when helping unfortunates: he knows what it is like to have nothing and no-one. He is at most times polite, educated and well-spoken, and unsurprisingly a very good singer. His work ethic is unbelievable, bordering on the fanatical, as is his perfectionist streak and ability to criticize. When about to change into lion shape he will take on certain animal characteristics: fangs, yellow eyes, claws. He has an abnormal talent for ventriloquism, strangulation and solving architectural problems.

O.G.

AU character info