I need to get my bearings.
I'm lost,
And the shadows keep on changing...

Name: Johnny Truant
Nickname: None. It's just Johnny.
Name Origin: Johnny, or John, a Hebrew name. Means "God is merciful." Truant, Old English/Celtic origins, means "one who shirks duty." Johnny finds his name to be somewhat funny but only in the way that makes you want to blow your fucking brains out.
Birthday: June 21st, 1985
Age: 23
Handwriting: here.
Manner of Speech: Johnny speaks quietly, voice scratchy because he screams and talks so much in his sleep. He speaks sometimes coarsely, invoking profanities, and sometimes very poetically; the way he writes. He loves making up elaborate stories, and the lies he tells sound unbelievable, but so wonderfully right. The truth of his background is so fantastic that he is often thought to be lying even when he is telling the honest-to-god truth.

Don't cry,
There's always a way,
Here in November in this house of leaves...

Height: 5' 10"
Weight: (back up to) 158
Build: Lean, gaining weight back slowly after having dipped very dangerously low.
Eye Color: Blue
Hair Color: Brown
Dress Style: Before he "found" the "book", he wore a lot of psuedo goth styled clothes. Velvet, lace the whole deal. Now, he wears band tee shirts and jeans, mainly.
Possessions: Pens, paper, the book (which resides with his doctor), a few tee-shirts and a few hats.
Home: It depends. He has lived in many states but he never really had a home. When he left L.A., his home was his car. It's still the only thing he has.
Parents: Pelafina H. Lièvre (deceased), Donnie R. Truant (deceased).
Siblings: None.
Financial Status: He has a few hundred dollars left...to last the rest of his life. Thankfully, he doesn't need it in this place.
History: If ever a child was born with tragedy inherent to their blood, peppering their genes, wending down their DNA, that child was one Johnathan Truant. UnFortunately, when he was brought into this world via Donald R. Truant and Pelafina H. Lievre, he had no idea of the life he was going to lead. No child knows the pain and turmoil of the world they are being brought into. It is their parent's job to introduce them to these things slowly and carefully. Or, perhaps, to keep them from seeing these things at all. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Johnny's father was a pilot, frequently gone, but loving when he was there. His mother, on the other hand, stayed home with him, teaching him everything that she could and loving him with the fierce intensity that she employed for every charge she was given. The small boy with the sea-glass eyes knew nothing but happiness with his mother. He didn't understand her intensity, her instability. She was his and he was hers. They were perfectly content with each other, in his mind.

Perhaps this implicit, innate trust was the culprit, then. The sort of trust that meant he would take anything that she gave him. The trust that meant that he would catch anything that she threw. So when when her arm accidentally hit a pan of boiling oil, he reached up, joy decorating his tender features, missing the pan but catching all the hot, golden pain, arms outstretched, nothing to lose but the very first bit of his innocence. The scars still decorate his arms, swirling their story down his forearms and all the way to his wrists. Even despite that moment, despite the fact that he had been given a reason not to trust, (it was an accident, just an accident, she never meant to hurt me, did she?), he remained her boy, the one who loved her most. Who trusted her most.

He was so young, how could he understand that she had to go away? His father insisted, said that he could care for the boy, that Pelafina was not to be trusted with the boy's welfare. After all, a physical ailment left him unable to continue flying, his license suspended, grounded, a slave once more to gravity...he could take care of the boy. And he did, even though he now had to take a trucking route, even though he was still gone. An absent but loving father and a mother who used to care...did she still? He couldn't tell. She never wrote him letters, never sent him notes, he never beheld her golden hair, silver streaking through it as if to testify to her infinite wisdom, anymore. It was just him, and occasionally, his father. Still, he loved his father nearly as much as his mother. Despite the fact that the man had lost his wings, he was still a god to Johnny, and he was all that the boy had left.

He wasn't prepared when his Icarus fell...could any child be? His father's wings had melted long ago and now he was trapped in a burning truck, head splintered like the glass of the cab of his rig, machinery and oil burning and wings gone altogether. The only closure that the boy could retain was the newspaper clipping, the tragic picture of his father's downfall, and even that was taken from him, snatched up just as he was also snatched up by the State, sent off to live with someone who could adequately care for him, as though those people even existed. They watched as he traced those lithe fingers over the black and white newsprint photo, the burning machine and the cracked glass. He traced and traced, tracing the fire that extinguished his father's life, not even daring to wonder whether or not his dramatic exit from this world was purposeful; he assumed that it was.

A series of foster homes came next, none of them terrible but all of them so terribly inadequate. What were they to do with this boy? His deep, sad eyes far too old for his age, holding tragedies and emotions and so, so much rage. He caused enough problems to be moved again and again, to a new house every few months, at least. And then it happened; he received his first letter from Pelafina , his first communique in years. She wrote such elegant, eloquent things, professing her deep love to him and explaining to him what had happened, why it had happened, and that she would be out someday to spend her days with him. He held on to her letters so tightly, his only link to the mother that he loved so deeply, his only link to a life where he had truly thought that he was happy. The cycle continued for a few years, until around the age of thirteen, he ended up with Raymond.

A former marine, Raymond was rough, hardened, a strict disciplinarian. He demanded that Johnny stop his schoolyard brawling, that he act in a way that Raymond could be proud of, and assured him that if he refused to do so, he would be very, very sorry. Johnny's rage and his mother's silken words fueled the next week and a half of bloody fight after bloody fight, culminating in the expulsion of the boy, and in a beating that turned in to more than a beating from Raymond. As he drove the high spirited boy from his house to the hospital, they made an extra stop; a stop that Johnny had neither planned on or expected. It was there that Raymond broke him in ways that could never be fixed, damaged him by routes that were far less obvious than his split eyebrow and broken tooth. That night, when the stitches were in place, and the bandages fresh and white, Johnny wrote the longest letter he would ever write, a mixture of love and fear and anger and trauma, wrote all of it to his mother, then burnt it all before the sun came up. He couldn't let her know of his pain. These burdens were his own to bear.

So he taught himself to be a rather adept liar, spinning tales that would allow him to forget the harsh realities of his life, telling the director of the Alaskan Fishing Department that he really was fifteen, and either he was convincing, or she could recognize his desperate need for escape, because off to Alaska he went. Still thirteen, but no longer with Raymond; his lies were a success. That summer he spent his time slaving away the the cannery, packaging up the fish that they caught on the boats. He worked six days per week, nothing coming easily, until finally that seventh day when he was allowed to run the beaches, lay flat in the cool sand and the lukewarm sun. The other boys that had arrived there...mostly fifteen and sixteen year olds but some younger even than Johnny, they were his comrades, they understood the life he had come from without words or descriptions. Their stories were all very different, and yet strikingly similar. Everyone had to escape. Everyone had to get away. The letters that his mother wrote didn't reach him here, and he never bothered to write her with his new address. He needed the break from hergor-deadly-geous words.

Despite the unforgettable stench of the salmon cannery, he might have been able to look back upon that time as a gentle reprieve. A break from Raymond, from the schoolyard fights, from the memories and tragedies that plagued him so insistently. If only he hadn't been on the boat, if only he hadn't watched it sink, watched him sink below the water, his screams echoing in the silent air. They had told him the boat was sea worthy, that is was ironclad. Just far enough away from the shore, with the cold water lapping up a little higher than they expected, the hull caved in with a crack, and though they were mostly able to drag themselves onto a bit of buoyant wreckage, there was one boy who was drug down, tangled in the nets, reaching out to them but they couldn't reach back, and then he was gone forever.

Johnny left Alaska, plagued with the memories of the friend he lost, moving directly onto boarding school, keeping himself from having to go back to Raymond. There he made friends, he made excellent grades, and he managed to remain under the radar. There were no more fights, and even a small group of friends. He was allowed to grow up almost normally, coddled in the insulating relief of having a group of peers surrounding you, but he kept up his correspondence with Pelafina , and during one break, he even went to see her at The Whale, the institute she was kept at. His love for his mother was strong, but he understood so much more about her now. Not yet bitter but understanding that she really was, as she put it, a "victim of faulty wiring".

Upon his graduation from the boarding school (he was only seventeen), he scraped together enough money from the government and otherwise to buy a plane ticket to Europe. With only a few hundred dollars, a Eurorail Pass, and a Pelikan pen, he spent his months traveling anywhere he pleased, seeing the usual things but also occupying himself with finding those people he could find kinship with. Perhaps then, it was not such a surprise when he ended up sleeping in a whorehouse in Rome, talking to the girls who worked there before they went out for their meaningless rounds. When he came back, he felt strangely refreshed, making a visit to The Whale yet again, sharing his experiences with his mother.

He thought about attending college, but then he received another letter, this time informing him of his mother's decline in health. He moved nearer to her asylum, visiting her occasionally, but she was nearly catatonic most of the time. They found her one morning, bedsheets wrapped around her neck and flung over the rod in the closet, thin frame all purple and discolored; she had died hours before.

Feeling the need to get far, far away, Johnny bought a bus ticket to L.A., unsure of why he chose this destination except that it was far enough away for him to try and escape, to forget, to lose himself in the night life and the clamor of the City of Angels. It was there that he met his best friend, Lude, a photographer and hair stylist who knew everything and everyone of consequence and was always surrounded by beautiful women. Johnny's life became a constant litany of change; different jobs, different lovers, different parties, different drugs. He and Lude played off of one another, often engaging girls in the stories long enough to engage them in something else or at least with something else. It was a life that wasn't charmed but at least it lacked the tragedy of his childhood, at least it was his own and not commanded by the Shakespearean letters of his mother or the rules of some family he never really belonged to in the first place. In LA, he had no history except that which he made for himself, and that was fine with him. He found a studio apartment with a landlord who didn't have delusions of grandeur, which is a long story but he'll tell you if you ask, and a new job as an apprentice in a tattoo shop, not settling down nor in but stable as he wanted to be nonetheless.

And that's when the phone call came.

Three in the morning and Lude was calling him, not for a party or a great deal of drugs or a new club, but for the sake of an old, blind man named Zampano who died in his apartment building. Because he valued the friendship, Johnny pulled himself out of bed and away from sleep, dressed somewhat haphazardly and headed down to Lude's building. His friend was waiting for him outside the gates, intimating that Zampano had lived there as long as anyone could remember, and that every day he made his rounds, surrounded by cats, slowly walking the courtyard, waving to those he could hear passing by. As they made their way up the stairs, Lude told him about the cats; how for the last several weeks they had been disappearing, some landing in the courtyard, ripped to pieces, innards strewn about, others just gone without so much as a whisper, no one knew where or how or to what end, but perhaps to Zampano's end, because the old man was dead now.

The apartment was not scary or creepy so much as just strange, windows boarded up, vents duct taped shut, the patina of smells permeating every inch of that place, telling of blood, sweat, tears, sex, life, death, anger, sorrow, happiness, depression, joy, and confusion. The smells of life lived out in a single apartment. Many things struck Johnny, from the carefully preserved white rosebud in the old man's dresser drawer to the refrigerator full of pale, strange books. And then he saw the dark cedar trunk in the corner, paint peeling, leather handles rotting, the entire thing rather nondescript. Lude was puzzled when he said that he wanted to keep it, but who was he to say otherwise? And so Johnny took home a large cedar trunk full of blank pieces of paper, wrappers, envelopes, stamps, random writeables that the old man kept for no easily ascertainable reason except perhaps his own obsession with his inability to truly use any of it.

Three months passed, everything seemed exceedingly normal...until Johnny began mentioning that he was transcribing the book that the old man wrote. Lude peeked into the trunk many times, but every time he looked, all that paper was blank, and the words that Johnny saw there were simply not existent. Still, Johnny talked of a house, of a documentary, of a photographer named Navidson, of Delial , of the minotaur, of the labyrinth, of the changing nature of time and space, of the ever elusive 1/4 inch. All that tragedy, all that trauma, all that faulty wiring, and finally his psyche had crumbled underneath the weight of it all, a slow progression at first, and then it all began to move much more quickly.

He would come to Lude with phrases, phrases in Latin, Greek, Russian, German, Spanish, French, and Lude would dutifully find him a translator, sometimes girls that had also been readers for Zampano. Regardless of whether or not they knew the man, they were always young and beautiful, and sleeping with them took Johnny's mind off of the house for at least a few hours at first. After awhile, even that stopped working. Eventually, nothing worked. Johnny flushed all of his drugs and threw out his alcohol, quit his job and sold his only reminder of his mother - her locket - to buy guns. The book was causing him a level of anxiety and paranoia that he had never known, making him nail tape measures to the walls and buy fifteen deadbolts for his door. He stopped leaving the house because when he did, all he could see was himself dying in terrible ways. He barely ate, losing all the weight that his lean build could afford, and still he was plagued with nightmares that he neither understood nor remembered.

Soon he was evicted, and so he left, not wanting the police to force his removal from the premises. If they saw him, they would think he was crazy, and then off to the hospital he would go. Instead he got in his car and drove to the East Coast, to Virginia, the place where the book was set. During this extended road trip, his musings somehow leaked onto the Internet, and there his book, which he credited to Zampano , became a cult hit. He didn't care. He only hoped that it wasn't true, that it wouldn't affect them the way it affected him. Back in LA, he discovered that Lude had been killed in a motorcycle accident that wasn't an accident at all. Before Lude's death, he had warned Johnny that someone was trying to find him, to "teach him a lesson". The jealous, angry boyfriend of one of the many translators who Johnny had slept with. Her name was Kyrie but they simply refereed to him as Gdansk man. Even as he was visiting Lude's grave, the man found him, and that was when Johnny finally, finally broke.

He took two hits and when plummeting to the ground, Gdansk man blathering something about how he hoped Johnny had learned his lesson. As the beefy monstrosity of a man walked away, Johnny found an empty Jack Daniels bottle and hit his attacker with it so quickly and so hard that the man never had a chance. Climbing atop the mountain of muscle who had started this whole mess, Johnny unleashed all of his fury and anxiety and aggression on the man, beating him senselessly, Kyrie screaming all the while, until he looked at her and made her realize that she was the next in line. The cops arrived, pulling him off of the other man, arresting him and taking him away one of several cars.

The next several months flew by, all judges and juries and the testimony of those who knew him before. They claimed that he would never hurt anyone that way when they knew him, but looking at him now, all emaciated and broken, they knew that he was not the Johnny Truant they had once pretended to love. Though the system drew out the case as the system often does, it was not long before Johnny was relegated to one of the best facilities in the country; Cheshire Crossing.

Please, I know it's hard to believe,
To see a perfect forest,
Through so many splintered trees...

Personality: [Jung Typology Personality Profile: ISFP.] Difficult to say, on the best of days. Johnny can be outgoing, charming, fun, and mysterious in all the right ways, then turn around and become reclusive, depressive, and for lack of a better word, psychotic. His personality and words have a depth to them that seem impossible to obtain from just twenty-three years of life, but there he is, in the flesh.

Constantly putting up a front, Johnny shows his real personality to very few people. He knows that people think he is insane, and hell, maybe he is. But he isn't going to act like it, if her can help it. Of course, the days when the house and all the darkness get the better of him, anyone can see why he is institutionalized. Obsessive, paranoid, and sometimes even violent, he is plagued by questions with no easy answers and fears with no easy comforts. Fortunately, those days he will probably spend most of his time in his room, staving off the uncertainty that so many hallways can bring.
Outwardly: Johnny is attractive, engaging, sometimes larger than life, sometimes not so much. He can be sweet or he can be spiteful, sometimes pathetic and other times a vessel of rage. He seems to be a shell of a man, but he is still beautiful, and there is something intensely haunting about his sea-glass eyes.
Inwardly: Explaining the inner workings of Johnny Truant is akin to dissecting a labyrinth that can never be explained, attempting to untwist it's complexities, searching for the minotaur but finding only the bones of those he's eaten. Or rather, the bones of those who starved, withered away, and decomposed. There is no minotaur, there is only a boy who tried to catch a pot of boiling oil. A boy with no mother. Scared, frightened, and alone, the bluish blackened imprints of her feline hands still decorating the pale, tender flesh of his neck. In a word, he is impossible.
First Impression: Depends entirely on the impression that Johnny wants you to have. He might be talkative, full of stories, true and untrue, about what made him into what he is, about what landed him in Cheshire Crossings. Or he might pace up and down the hallways, desperately attempting to measure and not speaking to anyone. Either way, he will probably be somewhere between enigmatic and batshit insane.
Quirks/Habits/Mannerisms: Johnny's quirks are more evident in his writing than anywhere else. He randomly mis spells words, throwing in references to The Book and the House and random code and other things. He uses vastly incorrect grammar, often using run on sentences and strange, almost nonsensical descriptions. When he talks, he will usually seem almost normal but highly intelligent, charming, clever, etc. Only when talks to certain people does he actually refer to the House, the book,and all of the mystery wherein. He enjoys telling long, elaborate stories about his past. Some true, some false, mostly a mix of the two.
Identifying Marks: Long, swirling, tidal scars decorate his forearms, ending right before his palms begin. A white line through his eyebrow, a large, jagged scar across his abdomen, raised, blotchy patches above his heart, a thick maroon gash over his shoulder, and several other random lines and dots. He also has a broken tooth.

As far as tattoos, he has a letter across each finger spelling "Book Worm", the starts of sleeves on one arm, mostly all snakes and flowers and the word "love", on the other wrist there is a simple sort of heart. On his left bicep, there is a traditional sort of tattoo of the Virgin Mary, surrounded by roses and vines, on his right bicep, there is a portrait of a little girl being stalked by a vulture, underneath it says "Delial". A vine twists from his left hip to right above his nipple, a design of swirls goes from beneath his belly button to beneath the waist line of his jeans, a circle in the middle with two straight black lines. Down his right side, an intricate latticework of gothic swirls with a circle in the middle and the two black lines. On his back, he has a full backpiece of a Yggdrasil tree, no animals in the roots or branched, but rather the branches are wrapped in measuring tape and the roots go down into staircases that go just beneath the waistline of his jeans and wrap slightly to his sides/hips. On his left calf he has several red, orange, and white koi, and the back of his right calf has a dark twisting staircase.
Likes: Cigarettes, pen and paper, small and meticulous tasks, his sort of music (whatever that means), ancient lore, mythology, storytelling, and a good night's sleep.
Dislikes: Sleeping, but only when it involves nightmares, mental institutions, lost or incorrect memories, not being able to keep track of his surroundings, being incapable of leaving as he pleases.
Strengths: Johnny is extremely intelligent. He can be engaging, funny, and his storytelling is top notch. He can even be sweet, and poetic and nice. His writing is unique and beautiful. He feels things very deeply sometimes, but sometimes that same quality can become a weakness. After all, aren't all strengths truly weaknesses in disguise? With that said, he is very adaptive, and flexible. He has rolled with the punches almosthis entire life.
Weaknesses: His phobias are a huge weakness. A crippling weakness. When he goes into a rage, the results can be catastrophic; just ask the 'missing link' he nearly killed with a whiskey bottle and his bare hands. He can isolate himself, and when he gets in those states, personal hygiene goes out the window. He has a very, very difficult time telling the truth most of the time.

You and me,
And these shadows keep on changing...

Disorders: Insomnia, Paranoid Schizophrenia, Nightmare Disorder, Possibly a Chronic Liar.
Introvert/Extrovert: Neither, really. He doesn't mind meeting new people, but he spends so much time obsessing over The Book that it makes it very difficult.
Pessimist/Optimist: The fact that he hasn't driven himself off a cliff, painted a wall with his brains, thrown himself in front of a bus, or stuffed tape measures down his own throat until he suffocated proves that he is very fucking optimistic.
Faith: See Below.
Phobias/Fears: They are difficult to put into words. How do you explain that you deeply fear 1/4 of an inch? That the very elusive nature of space and time can send you into a state of blind panic? That you know, know that there are subtle shifts occurring all around you, but nothing that you do, eat, drink, say, or kill will change that. Not pills, not alcohol, nothing you can shoot into your veins, nothing you can snort, no one that you can make love tofuck, Nothing, nothing, nothing will stop them. Which explains that his faith really isn't in anything except the elusive. The house is God, which is not to say that it is a house of God or even a house that contains God, but rather that the House itself is God.
Eyesite: Decent.
Hearing: Decent.
Left/Right/Ambi: Right.
Disabilities: None.
Drinks/Smokes: Smokes like a chimney. Hasn't drank since about halfway through transcribing the book.
Physical Health: It might have been good at one point. Now, he is in the process of gaining weight back, getting his teeth fixed, and generally looking like a human being again and not some sort of strange skeleton of a man.

Come here,
I've got the pieces here.
Time to gather up the splinters,
Build a casket for my tears...

Relationship Status: Single.
Sexual Preference: Bisexual.
Past Relationships: None that really qualify as "relationships." He never kept anyone around for very long.
Friends: Jeannie Lampanelli, Maggie Kelly.
Enemies: TBD.

I'm Haunted.

SL's

The Thumper. [OPEN], the potential love interest. A woman who not only understands but appreciates Johnny's ironies. Someone he can talk to, someone who listens to all his crazy verbal regurgitation regarding the house and everything else that bothers him. The one who can make him laugh, the one who captivates him. The one he could maybe, just maybe love.

The Lude. [neverduplicated], the best friend. Even though The Lude and Johnny have a lot of difference between them, they still get along famously. The Lude knows that Johnny is usually game for whatever they cook up, and because of that, they bring out the fun-loving side of him that most people never see. Even though they appear, on the surface, to just hang out and have fun, Johnny really cares for The Lude, and the feeling is mutual.

The Ashley. [OPEN], the one who never was. Johnny reacts so much differently to the Ashley then he does to other girls. He likes her, even lusts after her, but he doesn't just want her in the traditional sense of the word, or, depending on your perspective, perhaps he does want her in the very most traditional sense the word could have. He wants to woo her, he wants to make her fall in love, and then he wants to marry her. He wants to make a life with her, but unfortunately it can't ever happen because he is too late. She is someone else's and she will never be his.

The Boss. [OPEN] (male/female), The misguided authority. The Boss, despite their good intentions, rubs Johnny the wrong way. Refusing to even try and understand the intensity and meaning behind the house, the Boss makes dimwitted arguments about how Johnny should forget those things and move on in life. Johnny often insults and berates the Boss, but he does understand that the Boss has good intentions at heart.