project gemini } { application

[alias_savant]

Player Name: Emily
Player Journal: iluvroadrunner6
Player Age: 23
Current Characters:

Dean Winchester
Stefan Salvatore
Kate Beckett January | February

Character Name: Neal Caffrey
Canon: White Collar
Medium: TV

Character Age: 33
Canon Point: At the end of 316: Judgment Day, after Peter signals for him to run, but before he gets on the plane.

Why did you choose this character?:

In a general sense, I enjoy playing Neal because he’s a lot of fun to play. He’s interested in a little bit of everything, he knows about a little bit of everything, which allows him to have access to a wide range of CR and relationships. He can have interesting conversations with almost everyone he meets because he’s a complex character with a lot of interests. He’s also charming, a giant flirt, and not really aware of the existence of boundaries.

Oh, and he’s a thief. I have a type.

On a more specific level, however, playing Neal in panfandoms is always an exercise in giving him options. In canon, Neal is bound by the mistakes of his past—he’s on a tracking anklet that limits him to a two mile radius, and he is mostly treated as a criminal. In his statement during Neal’s commutation hearing, Peter said “As long as you treat Neal like a criminal, he’ll always think he is one,” advocating for his fate to be placed in his own hands. This is … pretty much the reason why I want to put Neal in this game. His record will be wiped clean, his past mistakes gone, and he is able to make a fresh start. It puts that decision in his hands, and it’s interesting to see how what happens to him and the world around him influence his decisions, and what person he becomes then.

Also, he’s really pretty.

Give a brief idea of how your character will react to the setting:

Neal’s first instinct will probably be to go to ground, but given that he has nothing but whatever Gemetics provides for him, he will probably head to the hotel and try to figure out who’s pulling the strings. After that, he will settle into the hotel room and probably stalk the network for a while, get a feel of the people who are there, and the people around him.

After that, he will do his best to create a persona that fits in with the rest of the group, find out what information they know, and go from there. He’d do his best to stay under the radar, as he doesn’t want to attract too much attention, but once he finds out he has no record here, he will definitely relax a bit and branch out a lot more.

History: Thank you, White Collar Wiki.

Personality:

Neal Caffrey, at face value, is an exercise in contradictions. He’s a conman with a heart of gold, educated but unmatriculated (and yes that is now a word), impulsive but calculated. So much of what he does may seem selfish and out for himself, but most of the time he does it for other people. He’s done a lot of growth over the course of his two years working with Peter, and at his core, Neal is witty, charming, and cautiously friendly. He knows how to use people and get them to do what he wants, but he’s also capable of being the best of friends, putting you before himself and having your back when your neck is on the line. He’s intelligent enough to try and play the rules, and most of the time does his best to do just that, but he’s got good intentions if nothing else.

At his core, Neal is about people. He understands the nuances of the way society works and the way humans read behavior. His attention to detail is not only what makes him an excellent forger but also an excellent conman, allowing him to blend into any situation by knowing the little details that will make it seem genuine. He’s willing to work hard, to put the effort in to make things perfect, rather than taking the blunt approach. There’s an elegance to his work that stems from his need to get all the details right, and it’s the reason why he can do what he does and minimize the people that get hurt in the process. In fact, a lot of what he does is for people, proving that it’s not just about how he influences them, but also how they influence him.

He starts out wanting to become a cop to live up to the memory of his dead hero of a father, and then runs in the opposite direction when he learns that wasn’t the truth, that he is the son of a dirty cop, and that his mother had lied to him. To an extent, he still has a respect for the law itself, and the spirit of the law, but not so much the letter of it. He sees the law as a line to work around, and the rules more as guidelines, and he tries to be a good person in his own way. While he is a conman who regularly breaks the law, he’s an art thief and in a sense, chose a victimless crime. He stole from people who could afford to lose, he doesn’t aim to physically harm anyone—he doesn’t even like to use a gun. He doesn’t want to hurt people, and in fact, he probably wouldn’t have made the moves as a conman that he did if it wasn’t for two people: Mozzie and Kate Moreau.

Mozzie is Neal’s best friend, and probably the second person that Neal is the most loyal to (the first being Peter). Mozzie and Neal are two people cut from the same cloth, which you wouldn’t really consider when looking at the two of them, but they both have the same kind of intentions. The only difference being that Mozzie is the one who’s usually looking for the big score. He’s the one who truly wants to subvert the law, while Neal enjoys the rush of the con. In the sense, they’re the perfect team, and they work well off each other—Neal is the smile and Mozzie is the brain. In the same vein, however, this also makes Mozzie the devil on his shoulder. He tries to get Neal to return to the life that he wants them to live, tries to sell him on the romance of it, which is one of Neal’s weaknesses. Mozzie is the one person who could sway Neal back to the darkside again, but at the same time respects Neal’s desire for his building a life and finding a family, something they both aspire to.

Aside from being charming as sin, Neal is a romantic, if that wasn’t inherently obvious by his appreciation of poetry and art. He has a thing for grand romantic gestures, and ninety-five percent of the time it’s the thing that gets him into trouble. Ninety-nine percent of the time, those gestures were the result of a woman named Kate Moreau. Kate was Neal’s first love, the woman he couldn’t save and one of the few people he’s willing to do anything for, even escape prison when he has months left on his sentence. Trying to save Kate led to a lot of reckless behavior on Neal’s part, and he made his name as a thief trying to win her back. When it came to protecting her, it could almost be said that Neal had tunnel vision, where she was the only thing that mattered, and since her death, Neal has been trying to figure out who he was outside of her. That was what really allowed him to grow and ground himself as a person. He could realign the center of his world to focus on more than one person, and see that being on the run wasn’t entirely worth it if you were going to be alone. That was really what allowed him to let Peter show him the benefits of settling down and building a life on more than just romance and that’s when Neal really begins to change.

Peter becomes the new cardinal North, so to speak, in Neal’s life. He’s the person that Neal looks to for approval, and one of the few law enforcement officials that Neal actually trusts. He is a father figure to Neal, almost in replacement of the one that Neal lost, and it’s because of that relationship that Neal can still find a way to appreciate the law, even if his real father didn’t respect it. He loves Peter’s love of the law, and his life is the one that Neal wants. He sees how happy Peter is with Elizabeth, and it’s the ideal that he wants his world to become. It has a stability to it that Neal never had with Kate or any of his other relationships. His expectations of people, and the pedestals that he place them on always seem to exceed who they actually are, but Peter is the one person who hasn’t let him down yet, and for that reason, Neal trusts him more than he would anyone else. Peter is truly honest, and while Neal knows that he’ll never be him—the rush of the con is still a large part of his life—it’s something that he can try to balance as best he can to make himself a better person. It won’t stop him from pushing those lines, however. He’s a bit like a child who’s starting to push his boundaries, trying to see how far Peter will let him go, and while Peter is always quick to reign him back in at first, there’s an extent to which he trusts Neal, which is also something Neal has never had, and has no reason to believe he deserves. Peter gives it to him, however, and he wants to continue to have it, so he does the best he can to stay in his good graces.

At the point in which Neal will be arriving in Minneapolis, Neal would have been inches from freedom, only to have it taken away from him. Agent Kramer, who was convinced that Neal would never be anything more than a criminal, planned to take him to DC, away from the family and life that Neal had built for himself, and keep him on his anklet permanently. Neal did everything he could to make sure that didn’t happen. While he didn’t know whether or not his sentence would be commuted, he knew that he would always have a place with Peter, which is what he wanted more than anything else. He had no intention of running, but when Peter gives him the go ahead, he trusts that, and prepares to leave everything he knows behind. It’s not the easiest decision he’s ever made, and while he could stay and tough things out, it would most likely involve going back to prison, and with Peter’s consent he ends up leaving his life behind anyway. It’s not an easy decision to make, but it’s what he needs to do to survive, and in the end, Neal can be counted on to do just that.

First Person Sample: A Dear Mun post for your viewing pleasure.

Third Person Sample: Here, have a thread.