(no subject)

[counterfake]

BASICS

name
Cole Alexander Crawford

alias
N/A

division
Exploration (Primary)
Operations (Secondary)

occupation
Explorer
Manager of TBD Restaurant

age & dob
37, July 22.

pronouns
He/Him

family
Melissa Crawford - 61
(Open to cousins, etc.)

CONCEPT

Can make terrible decisions because he always gets out of them.

POWERS

Rose-Colored Glasses;
Cole sees the world in a different color palette than most people. He can change the color of anything he sees!

Your sweater. His irises. The flowers on trees. Wallpaper.

Hypothetically...he could change contact lenses to another color and blind someone. Or he could alter the readouts on computer screens to reflect different information--maybe his groceries have a steeper discount than expected.

Also hypothetically, he could remove all the color from a safe which would make it ten times easier to lock-pick. For the most part? Silly party trick.

Exit Strategy;
Some people have to bribe their friends to get out of a bad date. Not Cole.

For some reason, he always has an escape plan in place. Has a test he didn't get to study for? Whoops, someone pulls the fire alarm mid-test and everyone's evacuated from the class. (Guess who got a 95% after a nap and a study session?)

He doesn't have complete control over his options. Sometimes it's something minor--a fire alarm. Sometimes it's a call from home and his mom's been injured. Sometimes a literal sinkhole will swallow him up to avoid a conversation with someone he's been avoiding. He can't choose what or how, only that it happens.

Puddle Jumping;
In combination with his Exit Strategy power, Cole can hop through portals, essentially. He cannot control when they appear. He cannot control where they go. He cannot summon them at will. They appear in conjunction with his other power and the portals lead anywhere they feel like going.

PERSONALITY

He's the type of person that could find a way to get along with most people--but is too smart and knows he'll never be able to actually befriend everyone. Sometimes he settles for being kind and befriends no one at all. On a good day, he could sell sand to desert-dwellers.

After two years in seclusion, however, his charming personality is a little more pointed. Charged. Loud noises will make him flinch. Too many people in one place will make him feel anxious. Closets are pretty much a no-go.

He's almost impossible to argue with because he'll usually find a way out of the conversation. Whether he likes it or not, tbh.

At times, he can be quick to judge and quicker to action. He doesn't always think before he speaks. But he is usually coming from a place of wanting to be helpful and compassionate.

APPEARANCE

Cole is just shy of 6'0. He's been doing pushups for fun in his seclusion, so buy some tickets to the GUN SHOW. (JK, they're normal, but if you want him to kiss his biceps or whatever those are, he will. Just for you.)

He has a cute lil capybara on his left arm in the crease on top of his elbow. Someone else drew it for him, but he wanted to have a piece of his friend wherever he went to use as a compass for doing the Right Thing.

Prefers over-the-head sweaters to cardigans. Will never wear flannel. Owns more suits than should be legal. Always has a little bit of paint somewhere. Clay's usually under those fingernails.

HISTORY

His parents were both artists, apparently. Cole never met his father, doesn't really have any interest in doing so. His mother believed that she had to starve for her art. Lose a piece of herself. She spent precious little money she had on the best canvas, the best paints, the best charcoal pencils. Her art ended up in galleries but rarely sold for much.

Cole went everywhere with his mother. The only reason he had dinner most nights was due to the generosity of others. Either they were settled in one place for hours at a museum or a gallery or the side of the road. If it weren't for his aunts and uncles, his clothes would have fallen to bits without his mother truly noticing.

She wasn't a bad mother. She didn't mean to be neglectful. She just thought that if she could sell one piece of her soul for enough money to the right person, she would feel complete. She would feel as if she had accomplished greatness. When they sat in front of the statues of their local museum and sketched them, she would hold him in her arms and whisper in his ear that they would both have their names in the history books. They, too, would be revered long after their time had come and gone.

It was undoubtedly this ideology that gave Cole his drive to do something memorable with his life. It was also what pushed him toward perfectionism. From the time he could hold a crayon, he was determined to create masterpieces. His mother couldn't wrap her brain around how he colored things, how he didn't need to trace outlines, how he took to clay and paint and ink like a duck to water.

He survived on hand-me-downs from cousins, dinners with grandparents, friends who allowed them to crash in guest rooms or on couches, and food pantries. He endured holidays without gifts and birthdays without cake. He didn't need the fuss--he just needed his mother to be happy. Or, well, he would have endured them without fuss if it weren't for his best friend, who taught herself how to bake cakes so he'd never go without. (And, realistically, her family kept his belly from going empty pretty often.)

When he was old enough to work, he saved up his money. He entered art contests regularly and saved whatever prize money that came with winning. His plan was to earn enough that he could rent studio space for his mother. Instead, the money went to treatments for arthritis. Her hands used to hold a paintbrush with ease--by the time he was eighteen, she could barely use them at all.

The rifts were ... not received well in his family or the neighborhood. Where possible, cones were stacked and temporary fences were erected to keep people from going too far or getting too close to them. Cole thought they were beautiful. He was drawn to them. But he never once got too close to those cones. He was too busy focusing on college applications.

There was a lot of hesitancy that coated the idea of leaving home for college. Who would care for his mother? Who would make sure she ate? Who would make sure she was okay? He would have stayed home, gone to community college, if it hadn't been for the acceptance letters to every single one of his dream schools. He had the opportunity to go wherever he'd wanted and he chose...Oberlin.

For a bit, college was nothing more than a bunch of hormonal baby-adults drinking, pranking each other, and still managing to turn their papers in on time. Cole split his time between school, work, art, and friends. Until he met Kate. After at least a month of cat-and-mouse where she seemed to leave a jacket or her book or her scarf everywhere for him to return to her, she agreed to a date.

Which would've been fine. Except that he was participating in a campus-wide event to 'paint' the sidewalks to raise money for some charity or another. His work was intended to look three dimensional with a pattern that made the sidewalk appear to fall away. When Kate arrived with her surprise boyfriend to check out his work, Cole briefly wished that the ground would swallow him up whole.

The fact that Cole survived was considered to be something of a miracle. It took the fire department to pull him out of the sinkhole. The whole thing was an incredible shock and the school did a lot of investigating into the soundness of the structures nearby. There were no other sinking spots in the ground. The sink hole was unexpected--but it also wasn't attributed to him.

He figured out his Liminal status a week later when a hookup's cat scratched his cheek and he bled everywhere. Immediately, he contacted the right people to identify himself, but continued with college. Continued with exploring who he was. Though the purple scab on his face did not help keep his status quiet.

It was somewhere near the end of his time in Oberlin that he considered the idea. The research he'd done on forgeries showed that it wouldn't be easy, but it could be possible. He could paint them--find someone in museums to switch out the originals for the replicas. And then he'd roll in the influx of cash.

It took some effort (okay, a lot of effort), but he managed to put together a small team of people who worked together for the process of painting forgeries, aging the work, switching out actual work, and auctioning real work to billionaires.

When he wasn't painting forgeries, he was painting his own works. Between gallery showings, he worked a series of odd jobs. Sometimes he worked at museums. He did freelance graphic design. He managed a movie theater. He even, briefly, worked at an Insomnia Bakery.

And...for a while, it all worked really well. Remember that Banksy painting? Real one's safe and sound in someone's living room in Dubai.

The move from Spokane out to Vermont came after his mother's permanent move to an assisted living with her mental decline. Running away from everything he knew made sense at the time. He took up a job with Enodia in the exploration department. Did little town life suit him? Probably not. But it did leave him a safe space to paint.

At first, the goal had been to sell enough to make enough money to survive. He had student loans. He had his mother's hospital bills. He had too many debts to count on both hands. It made sense to use his talents to get ahead. When the exchanges got riskier, his best friend suggested that they end the game. They'd accomplished more than they'd ever planned to. It was time.

After agreeing, he went on to finish one last painting without her. And that would've gone without a hitch had his studio in Albany not been raided by another group of artists who had been also dealing in forgeries for some time. His work had greatly decreased their profits and they'd been after him for years. One of their partners was pissed that they were backing out of the business and sold him out. When there didn't seem to be a way for escape, a hole in the wall behind him opened and then closed after he'd stepped in. Similarly, other holes and doors and rooms appeared one after another.

But he couldn't find a way back to the studio. Or Albany. Or Enodia. Sometimes rooms had food. Sometimes rooms had beds. But he never found a space with a door to lead the way out and back to the real world.

For hours every day, he wandered. Sometimes he heard people and spent hours screaming for help. Sometimes he simply laid on the ground and hoped--well.

In mid-June of 2023, he finally managed to see the sun again as his exit led to a tunnel beneath Burlington and then, somehow, back above ground.

NOTES

//anything else.//

OOC

Stevie . USA - EST . Matt Czuchry . Discord preferred.

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