watchesthebeans

The Player
Name/nickname: Kathryn
Age: born 1987
Pronouns: female
Contact: see mod contact info
Experience: ALL THE RP
Currently played characters: Andrew Noble, Yuri Kostoglodov, and Peter Vincent

The Character
DW account: watchesthebeans
Name: Aglet Bottlerack
Alias:
Age/Birthdate: 17 years old, born 1994
Species: Borrower
Canon: Original character from the Borrowers universe invented by Mary Norton
Canon point: 2011 (two weeks after meeting his cousins, the Settee family)
Played By: Logan Lerman

Icon:



Abilities:
Aglet has the power of size-swapping. When he's touching another living humanoid skin to skin, he can trade sizes with them. He does not become that person's exact height; if trading sizes with a Bean, Aglet becomes the size he would be if he had been born a Bean, and they become the size they would be if they were born a Borrower. At Bean size, Aglet is a little under 5'7". If he trades sizes with someone of a species larger or smaller than a Bean, he becomes the height he would be if he were a member of that species.


Appearance:
Aglet is a trifle short compared to other men his general size. His general size, however, is in the neighborhood of four inches tall. He's physically fit, but not visibly muscular, and has blue eyes and shaggy brown hair. His clothing is made of borrowed scraps of fabric; while Euphony taught him to make an effort to dress well, his clothing is obviously homemade and designed more for comfort and practicality than for looks. Aglet moves quietly and tends to stick close to walls rather than striking out into open spaces. He speaks quietly as well, and doesn't know how to deal with being interrupted or spoken over.


Personality:
Aglet has much the same basic outlook on life and people as most Borrowers: a mixture of pervasive paranoia and the feeling of entitlement. He's no stranger to hard work, having grown up assisting his aunt with cooking, cleaning, home repair, making and mending clothing, and all the many, many things a Borrower must do for himself in order to survive (and, to an extent, to live comfortably). However, he sees the world, and "Beans" in particular, as owing him all the supplies and possessions he needs or wants in life. From his perspective, Beans exist mainly for the purpose of making (and losing) the things Borrowers need. He has very little concept of what it means to steal despite being a habitual thief (indeed, he'd be very offended to be told that Borrowing is anything like theft at all). He would be unlikely to steal from a fellow Borrower, but as far as he's concerned, anything that belongs to the Beans as good as belongs to him already; it's only waiting to be borrowed.

Despite this cavalier attitude toward Beans' belongings, Aglet has a deep and abiding fear of Beans themselves. To be seen by a Bean is to bring down disaster on not only himself, not only his family, but Borrowers everywhere. Once a Bean has seen a Borrower, he believes, the only plausible conclusion is that the Bean will try to trap or kill him, and set out poisons and traps for any other Borrowers in the area.

Until meeting his cousins, Aglet was largely unaware of the traditional division between men's and women's work. The only person he knew growing up was his aunt, and she never bothered to tell him that in a larger family, it would have been the men borrowing and the women tending the house. A more serious consequence of his upbringing than his ignorance of gender roles is his ongoing social awkwardness. As of his entry to the game, Aglet has known his cousins, the Settee family, for only a few weeks, and no one else before that other than his aunt. He has a very difficult time fitting in or knowing how to talk to anyone other than his aunt, often assuming they can follow his thought processes better than they actually can, since his only conversational partner for the past fourteen years had been able to read him like a book. He's set in his habits; while he enjoys borrowing and will challenge himself to achieve new feats in that arena, he is completely uninterested in bettering himself at those things he finds difficult. As Aglet has dyscalculia, things he's bad at include basic mathematics, navigation outside his home, and name/face retrieval. The last was never a problem for him growing up, since there was only one person Aunt Euphony could be, but now that he's met other people he's found that it's difficult for him to remember who is who.


History:
The Bottlerack family did not actually live in the bottle rack in the cellar. They didn't live behind it or under it, either. In fact, they didn't live anywhere in the cellar at all, because while it was a rich source of food pickled, jellied, and packed away by the Beans at the end of each summer, the cellar tended to get untolerably damp in the spring. Presumably some ancestor had once lived under the rack that held bottle after bottle of fine Bean wine - or, as Aunt Euphony sometimes opined, someone in their past had simply decided that Bottlerack would be a more respectable name than whatever they'd been called before the family first arrived at the townhouse.

Aglet sometimes wished he knew more about his family's history, but the only person he could ask was Aunt Euphony, and she didn't seem know that much about their family farther back than her grandfather, who had also been Aglet's great-grandfather. Aglet had never known Grandpa Hispid, but then, Aglet had hardly ever known anyone other than Aunt Euphony. She'd looked after him since he was very little (well...very littler), when he'd lost his parents to a cat. She was his father's sister, and had already lived with the three of them before it happened, never having married herself. They lived alone in the townhouse--alone except for the Beans, but since Aglet had been forbidden until he was fourteen to even go out into an open space, much less near a Bean, he could hardly count the Beans as people he lived with. They were more like fixtures that came with the house - or like wild animals. It didn't take any pretending for a young Borrower to think of a Bean as a fierce creature that would tear him apart on sight.

Aunt Euphony taught him everything she could: housekeeping, cooking, reading, sewing, and, when he was a teenager, borrowing. Aglet was bright, or so she told him, but her attempts to teach him arithmetic--or anything to do with numbers--were never successful. He could add or subtract on paper, and she was able to impress the method to reading a clock's face on him at great length, but after a few years she gave up on teaching him much more about numbers, and he gladly abandoned math in favor of things he was better at. It was around the same time when he finally wheedled his way into his first borrowing excursion with her, and she took him to the kitchen to bring back a glob from the jar of peanut butter one of the Bean children had left open on the counter. Despite him trying to be careful, he'd come home with the inside of his bag covered in peanut butter after not putting the lid on his jar right. Aunt Euphony never seemed to make dumb mistakes like that, but she told him it was just because he was young, and that he'd learn from experience.

It was fortunate for both of them that Aunt Euphony had always been an adventurous woman, and a talented Borrower. She had kept their larder full year round for as far back as Aglet could remember, taking everything they needed one little piece at a time from the kitchen and cellar. Their fresh vegetables mostly came from the flower garden, where she would pick dandelions early in the spring and rose petals from the bush by the window all summer, so many of both that they had to turn most of it into jam to keep it from spoiling. Fresh fruit was a special treat only to be had when a Bean was careless and left something half-finished on a counter, as the children sometimes did. Otherwise, they ate many of the same packaged foods the Beans did, as Aunt Euphony was no hunter and Aglet, while he would have been quite happy to hunt and butcher a mouse, didn't have the skill to do so. Meat left out to thaw on the counter was fair game so long as they only took cuts too small for unobservant Bean eyes to see, so they weren't entirely without it, but that, too, was a treat to be savored when it was available.

And so they lived quietly in their rooms in the western wall of the townhouse year after year, occupying the little hidden home built, borrowed, and modified by generations of Bottleracks. It was really too big for just the two of them, but there were no others left - not in that house, anyway. Aunt Euphony told Aglet that she'd been told as a young girl that there had once been more Borrowers living in other parts of the house, but neither of them were ever able to find the homes those Borrowers must have left behind. It wasn't until Aglet's seventeenth year that he met another Borrower besides his aunt and his departed parents - and then it was only because of a catastrophe.

They had seen signs of termites for months, but there wasn't much to be done about it other than to barricade their home against the creatures. Aglet killed termites whenever he came across them, but not only did they bite back, but they excreted noxious toxins - and Aglet was no skilled fighter. Aunt Euphony forbade him from hunting termites after he came home with holes in his trousers and burn marks on his legs, but by then it was too late for two Borrowers to turn the tide of the infestation anyway.

The Beans, slow to notice the goings-on in the walls of their home, eventually became aware of the termites in their own plodding way. That the Beans were aware of the problem and taking steps to solve it was not any comfort - rather, Aunt Euphony informed Aglet that this meant the house would soon be full of poison, which might even be pumped into the air or right into the walls. The termites would probably be killed, but anyone else in the walls would face the same danger. Not only did they need to leave, but they needed to leave immediately, as the Beans could begin their attack on the termites at any time.

The home where Aglet had spent his youth was soon left behind, boarded up as best they could leave it in the hopes that the termites would be killed by the Beans before they were able to get inside. Aunt Euphony and Aglet each took all they could carry of supplies for the journey, as well as their most prized possessions in case they wouldn't be able to return.

Their journey dragged on for days, the pair forced to sleep in whatever semi-hidden places presented themselves. They passed through the neighboring townhouses before committing to the outdoors, but without any Borrower families to develop secret passageways, most of Bean homes they encountered were inhospitable. They were chased by pets on more than one occasion, even after they abandoned the indoors in favor of making their way across lawns and gardens by night. One miserable, nerve-wracking night even saw them crossing a road, hurrying across as fast as their tiny legs could carry them and collapsing in the grass on the far (far, far) side in relief.

According to Aunt Euphony, they were reenacting the journey his mother had taken with part of her own family before she'd met Aglet's father. They had cousins (or Aglet had cousins, anyway; they were only in-laws to Euphony) who, at last count, lived at a grocer's. Last count had been before Aglet was born, since no one on either side had been willing to make the dangerous journey for only a visit, but the Settee family was Euphony and Aglet's only hope--it was either hope those family members were still there and would welcome them, or try to carve out a completely new home all alone, even if only temporarily.

Despite Aglet's silent doubts and a nearly disastrous wrong turn that tacked an extra night onto their travels, the two Borrowers finally made it to the grocer's, footsore but safe and sound. They weren't expected, of course, but they were welcomed quickly enough into the fold once they'd explained who they were and why they had made the journey. This family, unlike Aglet's more immediate relatives, had flourished in the years since his mother left. Two families made their homes in the shop, but Aglet's cousins were the more numerous, with three generations living in one home.

Aglet spent about two weeks living among the Settees, trying and utterly failing to figure out how to interact with them. He had a great deal of difficulty telling them apart and keeping track of all their names, and he always seemed to be saying the wrong things. He'd never realized how used to his aunt he was; it seemed like he could always guess what she was thinking, but could never anticipate his cousins at all. Aglet grew reclusive, finding it easier to assign himself needless tasks that would take him away to the far reaches of the store than to deal with the pressure of social interactions.


Writing Sample:

[Ongoing thread for to show dialogue and interaction]

All is quiet in the darkened shop as Aglet crouches in a vent set high in the wall, silently readying his tools. There won't be any Beans about; the grocer's closed hours ago and its owner is safely absent. He's long used to borrowing in a house full of sleeping Beans, though, and even those members of the Settee family who have never borrowed from anywhere other than an empty shop don't go around making noise where there's even the slightest chance of a Bean hearing them.

They don't really need another bag of granola yet, but Aglet's been feeling restless and more than a little left out. Aunt Euphony doesn't talk to him as much anymore now that there are other Borrowers around, and every time he tries to talk to one of his cousins he comes out sounding like a complete idiot. He's tried, of course, and he'll try again -- and tonight he'll show them that at least he isn't useless. He'll come back with his bag stuffed with granola from one of the giant bins, and then they'll see that he's not so stupid as he thinks they think he is. He's done having everyone take care of him; it's time he shows that he can provide for the family, too.

"Here we go," he whispers under his breath, shouldering his bag and giving his coiled string one last tug to check its connection to the grappling hook on the end. He takes a deep breath, then pushes open the loose vent grate and props it open a scant inch, dropping down a string ladder fastened to the floor of the vent. Down this he climbs to make a ginger landing on top of the shelf that runs over top of all the bins. Without pausing, he scurries along the wall, making a beeline for the dry goods.

The moment at which everything goes wrong comes when he's stooped above the bins of cereal, squinting down at them and trying to remember which kind is the granola his cousins like and which is the kind they said was gross. He's about to just shimmy down and do a taste test when the world gives a sort of lurch. Aglet flails, grasping vainly for handholds on the box of wheat germ beside him, and lets out a sharp cry as feels himself topple over the edge.

He does not, as he expects, hit the hard plastic lid on the nearest bin and break all his bones. Instead, he lands on something surprisingly soft, bouncing back up a little ways before he settles on what feels like fabric. He lays stunned for a few moments, staring up at the ceiling, before he realizes something rather important:

The lights are on.

Without stopping to think about whether he'd do better to stay still until he can figure out what's happened, he scrambles to his feet and tries to run for what he thinks will be cover. It's only as he takes the first few steps that he realizes that absolutely nothing around him is familiar.


Anything else?