Ben Conoy
From Stjudehigh
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Ben Conoy is not a cylon.
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Contents |
[edit] Basic information
Name: Leoben Conoy, almost always Ben. Only one person has ever called him Leo and lived.
DOB: March 11, 1991
GPA: 3.1
Grade: 11
[edit] Physical Description
Ben is 5'10" and on the lean side, with grey eyes and short spiky blond hair. He tends to wear his shirts a little oversized, which makes him seem even skinnier than he actually is, but he's actually reasonably well-muscled and fit; he took dance lessons for some of the years he was being homeschooled, though he only ever really took to social dance. He's always within dress code at school, shirt tucked in and all, but outside he has a tendency to wear some really impossibly ugly shirts; it's highly likely he does this on purpose, for some reason. Maybe he's plotting to take over the world by blinding everyone else with his clothing.
[edit] Activities
Classes:
- Honors Chemistry
- Modern World Christianity
- Honors Precalculus
- AP English 11
- US History
- Psychology
- Drawing and Painting
- Health and Physical Education
Extracurriculars: Campus Ministry and Literary Magazine. He's also constantly drawing pictures of everyone, and is decent at ballroom dance, though it's a couple of years since he had lessons.
Job: Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday afternoons at a coffee shop downtown; also, tutoring other students in chemistry, psychology, and math (up through precalc), for which Ben charges five dollars an hour. Not much, but he doesn't mind doing it and it's extra snack money.
[edit] St. Jude's
[edit] Friends
- Candice Monaghan is Ben's Ministry buddy and adoptive little sister. She did not precisely get a say in this, but then again Ben tends to adopt siblings at the drop of a hat. There are rumors that he will curbstomp people who mess with her; considering that "curbstomp" isn't even in Ben's vocabulary, this isn't likely, but anything's possible, and he'd sure want to.
- Alexander Hill is Ben's good friend and occasional kidnapper; if you ever see Ben wearing actual solid-colored clothing voluntarily, it's probably because Alex dragged him to the mall and made him buy it. They work at the same coffee shop and get on surprisingly well; Ben's approximately infinite patience balances out Alex's approximately infinite hyper, so between them they're a pair of more-or-less normal human beings (except really not at all). Alex is also the only other kid at St. Jude's who currently knows for sure that Ben likes boys, by the simple expedient of having picked Ben's pocket and found a photo of him with his ex-boyfriend.
- Emerson Larson is pretty much, kind of, more or less Ben's boyfriend, in the sense where really he is, but would probably take off screeching into the distance if anybody actually said the word "boyfriend" in his general vicinity. In the meantime they continue to hang out a lot and smack each other around and watch horror movies by the metric ton, and to argue daily about which of them is girlier; there's just a lot more making out involved.
- Dane Murphy and Ben are writing a comic book-- well, Dane is writing it, and Ben is doing the art. Dane is also a co-conspirator in the whole turning-Ben-into-a-horror fan thing, though it's for slightly more practical purposes, since it is a vampire comic and all. Also, Dane's cat tried to scalp Ben and eat his brains once, but apparently that's a pretty commonplace event.
- Booster Carter isn't the best of Ben's friends or anything, but they're both from New York, and sometimes they chill together and talk. Anyway, Ben figures anyone whose cat writes poetry can't be that bad.
- Maria Al Fahad is . . . well, Maria. Also not the best of Ben's friends, per se, but he thinks she's pretty awesome. Oh, and he officially prescribes her as a cure for bored people.
[edit] Common knowledge
Things most people probably know, or at least could know about Ben:
It's worthy of note that Ben started school a few weeks late, this year, and was excused from PE for a few more weeks after that (and still changes his shirt in private). If asked, he'll say it's because he was sick, though that's not exactly true. He was a bit jumpy for a while, kind of wary of new people-- which, here, was everyone but his grandparents-- and hardly talked at all at first. Ben still occasionally jumps at loud noises, and isn't terribly fond of people sneaking up on him from behind.
However, Ben's made a conscious effort to get over what happened and is friendly with pretty much everybody by now; he's genuinely close to pretty much nobody, though, and certainly has yet to date anyone of either gender. He carries his sketchbook constantly and actually uses it, too-- he goes through about one a month, almost all drawings of either people at St. Jude's or random interesting strangers on the street. Pretty much he's always watching everyone, though he's so good-natured about it that it's not nearly as creepy as it could be.
In conversation, people will probably pick up that Ben has a much greater-than usual body of knowledge about religion, the supernatural, and superstitions and myths. He refers to his parents in the past tense, though he's never actually referred to them being dead and sometimes still slips up and refers to them in the present instead, and will freely admit to having lived with his aunt and cousin for a year before coming here, and being homeschooled by his parents in New York City before that. His coffee-making and tutoring jobs would be common knowledge, naturally, as would his personal interest in Psych and chemistry, and while he's devoutly Christian it's a very nebulous sort of Christianity and he never feels the need to witness to people; it simply comes up, sometimes, like things do.
Things Ben makes an effort not to let people know:
- Why he started the school year late.
- Whether he's gay, though he's not very well-practiced at hiding it and people have probably guessed.
- What happened to his parents, and why he only spent a year with his aunt before coming here.
- Pretty much anything at all about tenth grade, really.
[edit] Context
[edit] Personality
Ben is . . . very, very interested in people in general-- in watching how others behave and guessing at how they think. To this end, he makes a point of getting along with just about everybody without necessarily being good friends with many people, if anyone at all. At any given time-- especially in a relatively small school like St. Jude's-- he's usually a pretty handy reference for who's dating whom, smoking what, flunking which classes, et cetera; Ben doesn't have much use for this information, he just likes having it. He's openly Christian (Unitarian, but still), he's no-longer-so-openly gay, and he's always been that just-faintly-creepy kid who's constantly watching people and drawing pictures of them; the best way to deal with hovering on the fringes of everything, he's found, is to take full advantage of this.
Despite his persistent faint creepiness, though, Ben's generally an okay guy. He goes to parties, he drinks like a good little teenager and (usually) doesn't narc on people no matter what he knows about them, so people generally don't care that he's weird and dresses horribly and has sketchbooks full of drawings of everyone. Pretty much he's just cool enough to hang with the party kids, just dorky enough to hang with the smart kids, and more than arty enough to hang with the creative types. He just doesn't get terribly close to any of 'em if he can help it. Mostly by choice.
When Ben really does care about someone, though-- and he knows this about himself, and tries to avoid it as a result-- he cares a lot. He's very protective, and selfless to the point of sheer stupidity; Ben is usually pretty laid-back, but once he thinks something's the right thing to do, he does it, with a really spectacular lack of regard for common sense. It's like a warped form of idealism, really, where Ben simply fails to value his physical welfare as highly as he probably should compared to his emotional and spiritual welfare. It's worth noting, too, that Ben never yells at people. Ever. His parents were big on the idea of no one in the family ever yelling, but they couldn't stop people occasionally getting angry. So Ben doesn't get louder when he's upset; he gets quieter, and very carefully controlled. He knows people, has long practice at watching and reading them and knowing their weaknesses, and while he almost never takes advantage of that he could. If he wanted.
[edit] History
Ben's parents are decent enough people, but . . . ex-wannabe-hippies, minus a lot of the ex and wannabe parts, and consequently kind of scatterbrained. He went to elementary school for a couple of years, got made fun of a lot because he never had a haircut until he was about eight, was homeschooled (by one parent or the other, depending which of them happened to be employed at the time) from third through eighth grades, and finally ended up back in public school, dorky and confused as hell but at least with short hair, which helped. He figured out his peers, more or less, and was at least no longer getting beaten up by the end of the school year.
A few weeks before Ben started tenth grade, his parents vanished. No foul play, they simply found a cult they happened to like, moved out, and forgot to tell him first; he woke up one morning to his aunt and cousin knocking on the door to move him out, and that was all the notice he got. Tenth grade, in general, is a year Ben will not talk to anyone about if he can possibly help it; it was the one time he actually did narc on someone, because the other kid was not only dealing but had tried to assault Ben's cousin. An unfortunate confrontation resulted, the other kid (his name was Roger) tried to kill Ben-- and while Ben was in the hospital recovering from being stabbed his boyfriend's parents found out about their relationship and picked up and moved away immediately to prevent Jack being "corrupted" any further by Ben. Ben's aunt wasn't pleased, either, and once he was recovered enough to be mobile she decided he was too much trouble to keep around.
So here he is now with his grandparents, who are generally sane and have never yet either forgotten his existence or tried to guilt him into joining the Air Force, and are pretty happy and chill as long as he doesn't get himself hospitalized again and keeps getting As and Bs in things. He's been seeing a therapist, quietly, though he hopes he might not need to much longer. And, incidentally, he has no intention of giving much more than a crap about anyone anytime soon. Since that just went swimmingly last year.
[edit] Family
Mother: Maria Emerson, b. 1956. Maria's parents sent her to NYU in the hopes she would become a doctor or an author or something educated; instead she immediately discovered the merits of recreational drug use, and shortly after that the merits of Reg Conoy, and not a whole lot of actual education happened at all. They've both been working intermittently for the last while, if doing reasonably well between themselves, but it's usually Maria who was at home with Ben-- not because of gender roles or anything, but because she's generally spacier and a bit more permanently damaged (it was a lot of recreational drug use) than Reg, she has more trouble holding down a job.
Father: Reginald Conoy, b. 1956. Reg went to NYU to study film, and ended up meeting Maria Emerson, her friends, and their assorted recreational drugs of choice instead. He made it two years, still, before financial issues forced him to drop out and work full-time, and Maria decided to follow him. They've been together a good thirty-four years now, but nobody-- including them-- is entirely sure whether they're exactly married or not. Probably not.
Brother: Benjamin, last name unknown, b. 1976. No, seriously. Benjamin was born while Maria and Reg were still in college-- though they both dropped out shortly afterwards in any case-- and consequently they couldn't keep him; he was adopted out at birth. Fifteen years later another son happened, and Reg wanted to name him after his dad to be a dick and Maria just wanted to have Benjamin again, so they had to compromise somehow. Hence Leoben. Ben and Ben will probably never even learn of each other's existence, but this amuses the mun and explains some small backstory things, so hush.
Maternal grandparents: Theresa Schultz Emerson, b. 1930, and Nicholas Emerson, b. 1928. Theresa and Nick are urprisingly normal and sane-- rather traditional, and nominally Christian, but generally kind of bewildered by how their daughters respectively turned out, and rather saddened by the mutual animosity between them. They're also disappointed that neither Susan nor Maria finished college, and have high hopes for Ben's academic career by way of compensation.
Theresa's been a homemaker her entire life, though she occasionally paints on the side, and is generally fussy and worries about everybody in the universe; she's got a wicked sense of humor, though, if she really likes you. Nick served in the Korean War and then went to school and became a lawyer, and consequently can't be fazed by anything any more. Admittedly Theresa's a bit uncomfortable with Ben being gay, and Nick a bit more so, but they're willing to accept it (and, privately, hope he grows out of it) as long as it makes him happy and he doesn't get any diseases or anything.
Aunt: Susan Emerson (Lt. Col., USAF, ret.) b. 1951. Susan signed up for the Air Force the moment she turned 18, startling a lot of people, including her entire family. She was severely disappointed to find that because she was female she couldn't be deployed to Vietnam, raised a huge ruckus for a while, and then sucked it up and did the best she could being a military woman at the time-- which was still, apparently, pretty well. Things have changed in the military since then, as she's very well aware, and Susan has very high-- improbably high, even-- hopes for her daughter Kara to become the hero she didn't get to be.
Cousin: Kara Emerson, b.1992. Kara was an accident, knows it, and is in fact perversely proud of it. She's somehow picked up both her mother's arrogance and temper and none of the respect for authority that comes with it, and-- as Ben tells people-- thinks everything can be solved by punching it in the face. (Occasionally she's right.) She beat on Ben just as much when they were living together, and Susan frequently worried that someone at their school would blame her. Kara and Ben are actually very close, though-- she was the only one who knew he had a boyfriend, for most of the duration of that relationship-- and no one ever called the cops, anyway.
Paternal grandparents: Helen Loder Conoy, b. 1934, and Leonard Conoy, b. 1933. Helen and Leonard stopped speaking to Reg around when Benjamin happened. (I wonder why.) This also entailed cutting off any money they were giving him, forcing him to drop out of college at the end of his sophomore year.
[edit] Religious beliefs
Ben was raised Unitarian, more or less, but his parents were a slightly drug-addled bizarre species of Unitarian who, rather than believing that people could believe in anything, chose to believe in just about everything all by themselves. Consequently the five years of homeschooling they gave him were sprinkled with liberal doses of what they thought to be genuinely useful information about vampires, ghosts, fairies, and so forth. Fortunately Ben had a lot less chemically-induced brain damage than his parents, and a lot more time to spend at the public library, so he managed not to entirely inherit their credulity, but he fully believes that such things are at least possible and as much God's creatures as humanity or, say, cats.
The set of beliefs on which Ben was raised were incredibly optimistic and centered, pretty much, on a universe created and tied together by God's love for His creation. Until, oh, about two years ago, he firmly believed that everyone was good at heart and that, because God had a plan for the world, all things would eventually turn out for the best. Recent events have forced him to adjust those views somewhat, though he's clung to his optimism impressively well despite the circumstances-- or because of them, more like. A significant portion of Ben's ability to cope with what happened to him last summer rests on maintaining his faith that it was all, somehow, ultimately for the best.
The world Ben sees, now, is no longer the best of possible worlds-- but he does still believe very strongly that everything is interconnected somehow, that things happen for a reason, and that love is the greatest gift God ever gave His people. The universe isn't perfect-- everyone has the potential for good, but not everyone chooses to be. But God's universe, in Ben's view, is one of ultimate justice and balance, and in the end everyone gets what they deserve, for good or for ill.
[edit] Mun information
Ben is played by custardpringle, who used to play another Leoben somewhere else. She uses the same name on AIM and GChat should you want to talk to her, and generally goes by CP or Cyndi for short.
