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Group: Ridge Runners
Posts: 150
Member No.: 1,043
Joined: 14-July 08
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Name: Joey Sullivan
Age: 18
Grade: Senior
Sex: Male
Avatar: Ben Barnes
Family:
Father – Joe Sullivan, 44, factory manager consultant
Mother – Miranda Sullivan, nee Ketch, deceased
Sister – Amy Sullivan, 20, university student
Stepmother – Opal Sullivan, 41, formerly Dalton, nee Richards
Stepsiblings – Shelly, 20, working in Sao Paulo, Mark, 16, shop assistant, Luke, 10, school
Half siblings – Mathew, 6, Lucy, 2
Personality:
Odd. Strange. Sinister. Psychotic. Words that have followed Joey for as long as he can remember. He imagines that he wears them like a patchwork cloak, inspiring fear and a healthy respect for something strange and deadly that people these days just don’t understand. Something they may never have understood, because people like Joey were in the past always outcasts, specialists in a macabre trade. He’ll drop hints about what people like him used to do, but never openly tell someone, enjoying watching them becoming more and more lost in his own world of nightmares.
The only nightmare that scares Joey is the one in his head. After seeing what the knowledge his grandfather gave him can do, there’s nothing that can scare him more than what he knows he’s capable of. Some knowledge, he believes, should never be passed on, but as it has been and it’s made him what he is all he can do is ensure that it dies with him. It’s not even knowledge that he can block out or forget, nine years after his grandfather died all he has to do is look at someone to guess their height, weight and another number he refuses to explain when he starts talking about them. No one else has to know, and he tells himself that its better this way, even if he is alone.
He’s not one for caring about people, Joey. He can take or leave just about anyone in his life. But he does know enough to upset them and cares enough to teach them not to cross him. It’s dangerous, upsetting Joey, because he never hesitates with retaliation and in the same way that he can make a house seem sinister just by drifting from room to room he can make the most mundane objects seem threatening. It’s not really a surprise that he's never had any friends and even his family is wary of him. Joey, contrary to popular belief, has never got a perverse pleasure out of alarm and control of others. They challenge him by coming into his personal space or trying to change something about him, and they should expect a response appropriate to Joey’s mindset.
Joey has very few plans for the future, despite having been recognised as gifted in the field of English Literature. Believing himself to be a relic of the past he doesn’t see much point in planning for a future, besides, who’d hire him? He’s under no delusions about people liking him, and if no one likes him then no one’s going to hire him, so that’s his future down the drain. Instead he’s currently quite content to drift through life ensuring that his rights are respected, scaring people and making the psych’s jobs as complicated as possible. He’s been in therapy for years after all, he knows quite a number of tricks.
History:
Amy Sullivan was born two years before her brother Joey, and as a child was the only one to insist that there was something odd about him right from the start. To his working parents Miranda and Joe Sullivan he seemed normal enough, his maternal grandmother Edith might have been able to explain Amy’s view, but she chose not to and died when Joey was four from a stroke. Amy herself blamed their grandfather John Ketch, but he’d hardly explain it. In truth many thought the small boy with the coldly calculating eyes was sinister, but admitting to it would only make it worse, so they didn’t.
To the world, they seemed like a normal family. Amy frequently felt a strong sense of unreality about her life in the tiny house, their normal days at the Victorian-built school and the sheer normalness of everything when there was something so wrong about Joey. But it turned out Joey wasn’t the one she had to worry about, it was her mother. In her early thirties Miranda was a lovely woman, well liked in the community and where she worked. So lovely that she gained an obsessed stalker. Harry Stockins was rich, and had married for money, the more he watched Miranda and the nicer she was to him, the more he was convinced that he and Miranda were meant to be. Substance abuse during the seventies had left him with violent tendencies, and when Miranda refused to run away with him to the Caribbean to start a new life together he stabbed her thirty nine times with a kitchen knife and buried her in the woods.
Amy was at home in bed at the time, as was Joey. John was with them as Joe was away on an overnight training trip in his new position as a floor manager. When Miranda wasn’t home the following morning the police were notified. Joe came home at once, and Miranda’s body was unearthed from its shallow grave two days later. Joe and John identified the body while Amy and Joey waited outside. There are many chilling statements from Joey branded into Amy’s memory, and what he said that morning in November is one of them. Sitting beside her, one of his hands squeezed her shoulder as he said “Grandpa will set everything right, you’ll see”, all the time looking at the floor.
Harry Stockins was charged, but the evidence against him turned out to be insufficient for a conviction. One newspaper in particular reported that he’d said the Sullivan children should have been his, and it distressed Amy to no end. Joey seemed calm throughout the whole thing, staying close to his grandfather and becoming more and more sinister every second Amy watched him. Nightmares plagued her, frequently she’d clamber into her father’s bed or occasionally even Joey’s for the protection it offered, until one day Joey and John vanished early one morning. Joe didn’t know where they’d gone, and as he had a large bottle of something her mother had told her never to touch Amy left him alone that night.
Joey shook her awake at three in the morning the following day, whispering “He can’t hurt us any more, I told you grandpa would sort everything out.” Despite Amy’s persistent questions he refused to explain, and when the news that Harry Stockins was missing came the next morning she stopped asking questions instantly. She must have imagined it, because as sinister as Joey and John could be together they couldn’t have murdered the man who murdered her mother. It was all too confusing, and easier to block it out, and so she forgot it until Joey brought it up again years later. John faded fast after that, he’d been fighting cancer for years before and they’d known his time was limited, but something inside him seemed prepared to let go. It was partly the reason why the family wasn’t seriously investigated, Joe had been seen weeping in the garden completely drunk by attendants of a neighbour’s party and John was in no condition to have done anything but keep a quiet eye on the children. John died three weeks later, buried beside his wife and daughter with a funeral attended by family and what remaining friends he had. He was eighty four.
The entire family went into bereavement counselling, and while Amy was recognised as grieving Joey was, at nine, widely recognised as sinister. He didn’t cry, or even seem upset, but kept going on with his life. Perhaps, some people said, that it hadn’t really sunk in for him yet. He was nine. All the same, Amy noticed that they tried to avoid meeting his eyes if they could. Things managed to find another shade of normal, one far removed from what it had been. There was a gaping wound in their lives where Miranda had been ripped away, and Amy suspected that Joey was more upset about John’s death than he ever let on.
Unable to stay, after a year Joe moved to be closer to his own family. Joe Sullivan had been born and raised in Edinburgh, he’d moved down for a university course in business management and had stayed for Miranda. His own parents had died years ago, but he had an assortment of aunts, uncles and cousins in a small town where he settled with Amy and Joey when Amy was twelve and Joey ten. Amy quickly settled down, making friends with her cousins and the neighbouring children, but Joey went from bad to worse. In England it had always been that he was simply so quiet and stared so coldly that he seemed like a child ghost from a horror movie, but in Scotland it was almost as if he went out of his way to make people scared of him. It was nothing very serious, where most children asked where they’d came from he asked how long it took a body to rot in a shallow grave, when given drawing equipment he’d unfailingly draw gallows or cemeteries and when given toys they could almost unfailingly be found hanging from trees with string wrapped around their necks.
By the time Joey was eleven, Amy was seriously worried about him. Joe had withdrawn a lot since his wife’s death, and even more so since he’d been promoted again and met Opal Dalton, so he didn’t notice quite how bad things were getting. Joey had been in counselling ever since Miranda had died, but it didn’t seem to be making any difference for him. Opal had three children already, the thirteen year old Shelley, ten year old Mark and four year old Luke. Amy and Shelley got on well together, and Joey seemed perfectly happy to terrorise Mark and Luke, who adored Joe. Their own father had walked out when Luke was barely a month old, apparently unable to deal with Opal’s highly strung temper. Shelley agreed with Amy that Joey needed close watching, convinced that Joey was a serial killer in the making, and Amy agreed. She was wrong again. Everything went fine from the wedding right up to the point five months later when Joe had to go away for a training week.
It was the second worst period of Amy’s life. Opal had extreme fears that Joe would leave her as her previous husband had done, and even before that she’d been afraid of being left alone. During the times when she was left alone all men were regarded as demons, including her sons. Mark and Luke bore the brunt of her displeasure in slaps, punches and insults. On the first day after Joe left she’d hit Joey, he’d smiled and later that day used a wood chopping axe he’d stolen from a neighbour’s shed to chop the heads off every single one of her china dolls while Opal watched, white as a sheet, from the kitchen window. Joe shouted at him when he got home, but the message was clear and the point of the exercise understood – Joey didn’t care what Opal did to anyone else, but she wasn’t to touch him. Amy and Shelley were left to watch what was going on, Shelley with calm acceptance having seen it all before and Amy with shock. No one told, and Joe’s time spent away from home was only several weeks a year.
Amy couldn’t say when exactly Joey started drinking and law breaking. It wasn’t as if he hung with the wrong crowd, most of the time he didn’t hang out with anyone and scared the hell out of everyone who wanted to bully him. When he was fifteen he was first escorted home by the police for fighting on the streets, and they seemed eager to be rid of him. The next thing Amy heard was that he’d been implicated in vandalism of first the children’s play area in the local park and then private property, although nothing further was said on the matter. Then all the scotch went missing, and when questions Joey admitted donating it to a group of boys hanging around on a street corner. Then there were the accusations of car theft, being hauled home several times a year completely drunk, the destruction of other people’s property when they’d irritated him and the escalation of his usual stunts into something much worse.
A boy who’d taken Joey’s seat in English found a decapitated crow in his bag a week later. Lucy’s stuffed rabbit was found continuously with a noose around its neck. Pig’s blood was poured all over Opal and Joe’s bed when they decided not to go to England that year on the anniversary of Miranda and John’s deaths. A child at the infant’s school found her Barbie doll to have been chopped up and buried in the sand pit after she hurled a fruit juice drink bottle at Joey. One of Joey’s most disliked teaches walked out of his front door and straight into a hangman’s noose dangling from the porch ceiling. Everyone knew who’d done it, but no one could do anything but talk to him about it. Joey smoked, he drank, he broke laws, he scared people – and he didn’t seem to care at all. He’d been in counselling since he was eight and there was nothing specifically wrong with him, even if he scared people and everything else he did do well in academic subjects.
The final straw came two months ago when Amy came home from university for the Easter break. Without knowing it she’d been a limiting influence, Joey was always marginally better behaved when she was around as after knowing him all his life she was prepared to argue with him on important things. When she’d left for university things had become much worse. He was drinking heavily, stealing to finance his drinking, smoking on top of that and his pranks, as he called them, were still going strong. The worst thing was, in Amy’s opinion, that he wasn’t just another out of control teenager – looking at him he was still sinister enough to have walked out of a classic horror movie where the suspense was created by the actors rather than anything else. After two days they got into an argument about Joey’s drinking, Amy yelling that Joey was stupid for doing it and they all knew he wasn’t stupid because somehow he was still getting good marks at school despite being almost constantly hung over, and Joey shouting back that she knew why he was drinking so much because she was the only person he’d told.
She remembered the day he’d vanished then, and what he’d said when he came home. Standing in the middle of the kitchen Amy asked Joey if he and John had killed Harry Stockins. The question “What do you think?” is a fairly innocent one under most circumstances, but in the context of her question and Joey’s sinister, worn out smile it made Amy scream and lock herself in the bathroom.
It was not a good day for Joe. Joey stalked out of the house as he was coming home looking as if he was going to hit something or burst into tears, both of which only ever promised hell to pay later, he’d received a message from the social services that it was possible that Opal was hitting their children while he wasn’t there, and Amy was locked in the bathroom crying about Joey and John murdering someone (which he at least found absolutely ridiculous). All in all he felt quite glad when it came to an end, and quite irritated when he had to go and collect Joey and a fresh set of stitches from the emergency room at a nearby hospital at around four in the morning the following day.
Two days later a very irate Joey was dropped off at a detox centre and left there for a fortnight to get the alcohol out of his system while Joe researched his options. Somehow he didn’t think having Joey committed was going to help, tempting as it was. He’d been in and out of therapy for almost ten years at that stage, over half his life, and that was Joe’s first port of call. Conflicting reports left him in the dark as to what was going on and every therapist he talked to gave him different advice on how to handle Joey. Opal had taken her lead from Amy and was insisting that she wanted Joey out of her house even while the social services were still looking for signs of abuse. It was, in short, a complete mess and one that needed to be sorted out before Joey got back.
Joe’s family eventually became more helpful once they realised that Joe wasn’t going to be asking one of them to take on Joey, and eventually one of them said that they had a cousin in Canada whose child went to a school for troubled teenagers. Opal and Joe pounced on the idea, and instantly got in touch. Joe wasn’t sure if screaming while on the phone to one of Horizon’s counsellors because Joey had just thrown a blood covered baby doll at him was a good thing or not, but Joey was given a place and made to pack his bags for a Trans-Atlantic trip.
Reason for admittance:
Alcohol abuse
Petty crime
Rebellious/scary behaviour
Long-term problems possibly dating back to his mother's death
Rp Sample:
“I really think you’re going to like it here.” Joe did sound sincere, looking left and right before pulling out of the junction then stopping for some idiot pedestrian on a mobile who’d just walked into the road. He took the opportunity to glance over at his son, sprawled in the passenger seat of the car and looking wiped out. Joe wasn’t sure why as they’d actually come from a time zone ahead of this one, but then he didn’t know that Joey had been up for almost twenty four hours by this stage. Most of it had been travelling, but the last night he’d been up plotting and making arrangements.
“For what dreams may come when we have shuffled off these mortal coils?” His son muttered back, shifting his head to a more comfortable position. Resisting the temptation to groan and bang his head on the steering wheel Joe continued driving. Joey had been doing this ever since Joe had dragged him to the airport. At first he hadn’t even realised what Joey was doing, and it had taken a discussion about Caliban’s status in the Tempest for Joe to realise that his eighteen year old was not speaking to him, he was quoting to him. The woman who was participating in the discussion, a Shakespearian actress, had been quite amused. Joe decidedly wasn’t.
“You’re going to have to stop that.” There wasn’t so much as a pause before Joey responded. “Fight the year out, the warlords said.” Joe had, after all, been saying that since last night when they’d stopped at a hotel. Joey had no intention of stopping voluntarily, the rules of the game dictated that he had to stop when someone told him what he was quoting. There was very little chance of this happening. His father had never been a literature student.
“Joey, I mean it, okay.” There was an edge to his voice as he looked for the next turnoff, the one that would lead to the school. After all that Joey had done he wasn’t expecting cooperation, but just once it would be nice to have his son do as he asked him. “The mind of man is unconquerable if it choose.” Of course, there was little chance of Joey suddenly taking mercy on him.
“Fine, you know what? If you’re not going to talk to me, then don’t talk.” On the steering wheel his knuckles became whiter as he gripped it harder, and if he’d looked aside he’d have seen that Joey was giving them an amused look. He could have sworn he heard Joey mutter “The deaf dragging the muted,” but didn’t comment and silence reigned in the car for the rest of the journey.
Read the rules?
Yes... a long time ago.
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Sullivan, Joey
