CIVILIAN . MARTIN, NEELANJAN

MALE

BISEXUAL

TWENTY

JANUARY 31ST, 1992

AMERICAN CITIZEN, AUSTRALIAN PERMANENT RESIDENT

ENGLISH. C++, JAVA, JAVASCRIPT, LINUX, PYTHON. INVENTED A FAKE LANGUAGE WITH KRIS THAT THEY ARE UPDATING CONSTANTLY.

NEIL. NOBODY CALLS HIM NEELANJAN EXCEPT HIS MUM.

0.50

Civilian

None

None

04 Oct 2013 by TERR

ROGUE

HAYDEN GREEN
COLIN COX
QUENTIN CHOU
CALLUM SNOW
ANABEL BAILEY

NOPE.

LEO VALDEZ from THE HEROES OF OLYMPUS

Neil hails from an upper-class family. While he was born in Chigago, Illnois, his family has lived in Perth, Australia since he was two years old. He had initially come back to the United States so he could go to college, specifically, at the Rochester Institute of Technology. But well, he isn't exactly there right now, is he? Instead, he is living and working in Los Angeles, California this summer. As a Software Engineering Intern for Google, he's arguably being challenged more right now than he ever was at school. He won't be going back if he can help it. Or at least, not for a long while. 

Besides, being a working man has its perks. While he would have preferred to be living with his friend Kristen, some things just don't work out the way you imagine them to. (He would know.) However, with the housing stipend that Google has provided him, he's managed to rent out a studio apartment near his workplace. It's pretty cozy: not the largest in the world, but it's a ten-minute walk away from Venice Beach. He's actually gotten back into exercising every morning before he goes to work.

All in all, life is good. For the moment, at least.

You know those assholes who walk the world with an aura of serenity, acting like nothing can possibly perturb them? Neil is one of those guys. The first thing you will notice about him is his air of calmness, heightened by bright blue eyes that are certainly unusual for someone who looks South Asian. He has his mother's heritage to thank for that, as the Northwest Indians usually have some Western Eurasian genes in them, but he doesn't tell the ignorant this: he prefers to keep them guessing. Add a cheeky laugh and a mischievous grin, and there you have it, his mask that he is unconquerable, undefeatable.

It certainly helps that he didn't lose out in the looks department. The combination of his parents' heritage has worked in his favor-- Neil's father is Jewish-American, and his gene pool combined with his mother's have produced quite the attractive young man. He has his mother's light brown skin, but his father's large eyes and chestnut-brown hair. It is cut into messy layers, framing a heart-shaped jaw line. Unfortunately for him, he did not get his father's height, and he stands at 5'10", just slightly above average. He doesn't mind not being taller though. It isn't as though he wants to be remembered for his appearance, anyhow.

For that reason, Neil has never been all that careful about what he wears. He has no qualms walking to the store in sweatpants. Though he would draw the line at wearing them when he goes to the mall, or when he goes to work. Instead, he is likely to throw on a T-shirt or sleeveless tank, along with a pair of jeans or board shorts when it is hot. He does his best to avoid wearing anything on his feet but his flip-flops, and will do so until it gets to a point in winter when his feet are half-frozen. When it's cold, he'll throw on a parka with a scarf, along with a pair of sports trainers. He could probably afford nice clothes, but prefers to spend his money on other things.

He is less toned than he used to be, due to the fact that he has been exercising much less in college. Lack of motivation tends to do that to you, and while he would never have been described as such before, one might now say that he is skinny. But he's beginning to run again, and is thinking of maybe taking up a martial art. It's a wonder how much being happier with your life can change the way you look. The spring in his step has returned, and the bags beneath his eyes are starting to fade. But they're all small things, so tiny that very few would be able to notice. Even when he was absolutely miserable, it wasn't in his nature to show just anybody that he wasn't doing completely all right.

Calm: The first thing most notice about Neil is that little seems to faze him. He is able to keep a cool in most situations, rationalizing his actions with what he deems to be common sense. He prefers to think things through rather than go rushing in headlong, though there are certainly exceptions to this rule. Like anyone else, he is susceptible to flights of passion when strong emotions come into play, though this is a rare occurrence. He is certainly levelheaded and calm most of the time, and can be counted on to keep the show running when everyone around him is starting to panic and freak out.

Lighthearted: Similarly, there is little that Neil appears to take seriously. Everything is met with a smile and a shrug, and a reply in a singsong voice. He can have a tendency to underestimate the gravity of a situation, and tends to get carried away with his ideas and plans. Occasionally, he does not realize that his actions can hurt people, though this is hardly because of malice. Sadly, there are few people whose feelings he takes into consideration when doing what he wants to do. He doesn't mean to hurt people, he really doesn't-- for someone as intelligent as he is, he sometimes just doesn't think.

Ingenious: With a sharp mind that enjoys deductive reasoning, he was consistently top of his class back home in Australia. He was always great at thinking out of the box, which earned him far better grades than people who learned through rote memorization. This didn't change much once he went to college, where he was a straight-A student. He'll never admit it out loud, but Neil will pride himself on being the smartest person in the room in most situations. However, this has changed with his new job, where he is meeting interesting people, men and women with projects bigger and better than he could ever dreamed of. It's a learning experience, and certainly humbling.

Arrogant: And that's a good thing, too, considering how massive Neil's ego is. Recent events have rendered him less conceited than he used to be, but on a subconscious level, he does think that he is better than most people. Not just more intelligent, but more equipped, more rational, less prone to flights of fancy. He has become better as of late, but the part of him that looks down on most other people is still there. He won't show it, but he holds little respect for the majority of the human population. If he sees you as an equal, consider yourself honored. If he sees you as a superior, you probably did something amazing to command his respect.

Loyal: Once he decides he likes you, Neil is definitely someone to rely on. He doesn't have many friends, and will defend you to the death when he counts you among their number. He will have your back no matter what, and will cover for you even if he believes that you are doing something wrong. Neil can definitely be hypocritical when it comes to his nearest and dearest. What he might deem unforgivable when done by someone he doesn't like might be a mild annoyance when done by a friend. It is something he is aware of, but he has rationalized it as being a defense mechanism to maintain his few friendships.

Distant: This is partly because he considers himself to be above most others, but Neil is simply not a very trusting person by nature. It isn't that he has a fear of being hurt, no. Rather, Neil feels that trust is something that has to be given out to only a select few. Most people have to prove themselves to him before he decides to rely on them. Unless he absolutely has to be such as in a work situation, Neil is certainly not a team player. He would much rather play the part of a leader rather than a follower. While he might be good at following instructions, he will not be all too happy about doing so unless he respects you.

Jaded: Deep down, Neil has always had the worldview that most people are going to end up going nowhere. Some teenage partiers end up working at a cash register, asking you whether you want fries with that. Others will end up at a nine-to-five dead end job, slaving their lives away at something that they don't care about nor love. While some might be content being just another cog in the machine that runs society, Neil sees humanity as a mass of untapped potential. He doesn't think people are innately useless. However, most people haven't learned to channel their talents and hone their energy, while he has. Or at least, so he used to think.

Ambitious: He isn't going to be one of those people. He isn't. Neil is fully aware of the fact that he has been blessed with a multitude of both material and emotional resources. He is of the strong belief that it would be a waste of his parents' hard work if he were to end up being ordinary, and he knows that he is fully capable of doing amazing things. If it means that he has to fight his way to get there, then he will.

Awkward: He never was back in Australia, and never in college. In fact, he would never have described himself as awkward before, not at all. But with his new job, he has started finding himself in a position where he has to answer to other people. Neil is starting to realize that he is bad at talking to figures of authority, especially those who he is going to have to impress to get further. He is good with his words most of the time, and calm in most situations. He can definitely be charming, when he wants to be. However, that goes right out the window when talking to superiors. He wonders how he passed the interview nightly, though it might have something to do with the fact that he managed to calculate how many ping-pong balls could fit in a school bus.

Lonely: The ultimate irony about Neil is that his arrogance has pushed people away. He constantly craves the company of people who have similar mindsets to him, but he is unwilling to get to know most others because he dismisses them at first glance. As a result, he sticks to a select few, placing all his faith in them in the hope that they will not leave. He has given them his complete trust, just as they have given him theirs. And despite all his arrogance and all his flaws, he is someone who will never break it.

"It was a dark and stormy night when you were born."

That was what his mother would tell him when he asked about his birth as a child. Her eyes were wide, her voice was soft, and she always wore the same loving smile as she tucked him into bed and gave him a kiss on the cheek. Her soft alto would fill the room as she sat by his side, filling the room with the tale of how she had broken water a month too early, and Neelanjan Martin had arrived into the world sooner than expected. It hadn't been an easy birth, she would tell him with a chuckle. It wasn't easy, but that was okay.

After all, Neil was an easy child, and had never cried too much or demanded too much attention. Even when they moved from his birthplace of Chicago to Perth, Australia when he was two, he had made the multiple plane journeys with relatively little protest. While he doesn't remember this, his mother will tell people he had curled up onto his seat and fallen asleep almost instantly, only waking up twenty minutes before they landed in the next airport. In many ways, he'd been every parent's dream child. There was little fussing and little screaming, and, as his doting mother and father soon came to realize, little need to teach him too much. He was memorizing multiplication tables at the age of four, and, at five, his mother enrolled him in a Kumon math centre where he tackled problems far beyond his level.

Neil was far from being any sort of prodigy, his father cautioned. Though he was definitely precocious for his age, he was hardly an Einstein. But his mother saw that Neil enjoyed learning and didn't seem to mind tackling difficult material, and it was then when she started filling his head with the idea that he would some day go on to do wonderful things. Because, she would say, if he worked hard and kept trying, learned about math and science, he could be one of the greatest people in the world.

Of course Neil was completely entranced by the idea of being somebody. Besides, being somebody seemed so easy when you enjoyed doing the things required! So he built his dreams with castles made of hopes, and continued to read and research and talk about computers with his dad. His father worried about his being ostracized for being nerdy when he went to school, so he enrolled him in swimming and squash classes as well. It seemed like a miracle when his instructors told his parents that he had a natural affinity for athletics. In fact, his father couldn't help but wonder if it was too good to be true. There was a down side to being precocious, and as a child, Neil always played better with older children than kids his own age. His father wondered if he was going to go to school and be all alone. But his concerns quickly faded when he came back on his first day of school and declared that he had made some friends who liked sports as well, and that they had all played together during lunch.

So Neil grew up fairly normally until he was thirteen, when children started segmenting themselves into crowds. With his athletic ability and easy charm, Neil found himself herded into the popular group. His friends became the kids who mouthed off at teachers and slacked off at school, and while he had thought it funny at first, he soon began to realize how stupid this all was. Sure, it might have been amusing for them to skip classes and not do their homework, but Neil actually enjoyed learning, even if he was reading way beyond the source material. Science was fun, and he actually enjoyed learning in the computer classes that he was taking. After school they would go and smoke at the mall, while Neil would rather have played sports like they had when they were younger. School work was easy for him, but it didn't mean that he was going to not at least do the bare minimum. They were wasting a good private school education that their parents had paid for. He'd been friends with them for a reason. They were smart. So why were they wasting their lives away?

He wasn't about to rat them out. They weren't necessarily bad people, Neil knew-- they didn't bully others like the popular kids in other schools. They didn't laugh at him for liking computers and developing an interest in programming, without realizing that it was slowly coming to replace his real relationships. But his friends did shake him up, rustle him a little for every party he didn't show up to, for every girl he turned down because he simply wasn't interested. "Come on man," they would say, "We're your friends." It was true: they really were, or at least, they were supposed to be. With each passing day Neil felt less and less like he had anything in common with them, and sitting at their lunch table every day felt more and more like a chore. Yet they constantly made an effort to include him, asking him if he was just scared of offending his mum.

"Sneak out", they told him. "What she doesn't know won't hurt her."

It was only a matter of time until Neil caved in to peer pressure. On one breezy autumn night, he climbed out his back door when his parents were asleep, and made it to his friend's flat where a party was going on. This wasn't just any children's party, either. His friends were drinking alcohol, which he'd never tried before. Kids were drunkenly stumbling on the space they called the dance floor, two guys were ripping their clothes off, and he had a feeling that the white stuff some of his buddies were snorting through a straw wasn't exactly talcum powder. But he wasn't ready for that. Though when his friend handed a red paper cup over with a gleeful smile, glad that the last one of their group had joined them at last, Neil had been unable to resist the enticement of trying alcohol once. It was just one drink, and then another.

And it hit Neil that he was the most miserable drunk in history.

He had the affliction of still being completely in control of his thoughts, of knowing exactly what was going on. While everything around him swirled into a blur of murmurs and shades, all he recalled was the thought that he needed to get out, that he needed to get away. He remembered a friend tapping him on the shoulder, asking him if things were going to be okay, but all he did was brush her off. He made his way to the balcony, shutting the door behind him, and there he was: alone with his thoughts to keep him company, along with the affirmation that this was all pointless. Were his friends going to spend the rest of their youths partying, only to gear themselves up for either working behind a check-in counter or a nine-to-five job that they were going to hate?

He wasn't about to subscribe to that, because he could do so much better.

Slowly, he distanced himself from the crowd. He withdrew from the basketball team his friends and him had formed, seeing as they didn't seem to be interested in playing as much any more. Instead, he focused his energies on playing squash, practicing hard so that he could do well in singles tournaments. He still spoke with his friends and remained on good terms with them, and to the casual onlooker he was still Neil. Cheery Neil, Neil who didn't take anything seriously. But in less than a year it was evident that he was no longer part of the group. The thought of making new friends had crossed his mind, but he decided that there was no point to doing so. Being close to people was no longer a priority, not when there was nobody around who he could relate to. Not when there was nobody around who would be able to connect with him on an emotional level. All he needed was for a couple of people to eat lunch with before he went home and continued to do the things he loved, taking college classes online for fun. Easy ones, of course. But then again, everything he tried seemed turned out to be easy. 

He was going to get somewhere, if nobody else that he knew was. He made friends on the Internet and in programming classes he took outside of school, conversed with his father's colleagues. It all looked like it was in good fun, and it was. His parents knew that he was lonely, but there was nothing that Neil would do to change it. It wasn't as though he was socially awkward, he just no longer wished to be friends with most of his peers. On a subconscious level, he thought himself better than them. Smarter than them, more mature than them, more likely to get somewhere in life, and to get the hell out of Perth where there was nothing for him. Save for his parents, there were few people who he had any sort of emotional attachment to, and while he told himself it wasn't for want of trying the truth was that he could have made so much more of an effort. Years passed, and it was time for Neil to apply to college. He sent applications off far away from Perth, back to America where he had been born. Almost all of them were to the best schools, of course. Where else was he going to apply if he was going to do something amazing some day?

But he didn't get into any of the ones he'd hoped for.

To his horror, he had been waitlisted for school after school, each of them telling him that he was almost good enough, but not quite. Each letter was a grim message asking him to wait, to keep his fingers crossed, to pray that someone would fall out and that he would be able to take their place. The letters trickling with good news were to his safety schools, to the places that he'd only applied to just in case. His contingency plans, his second choices. Places where he knew he was too good for. So for weeks he was stuck hoping, stuck waiting, his mother's prayers for a miracle audible outside his door. But there was no news. No nothing.

Neil felt like he had been kicked in the face. For someone who'd had everything come so easily to him as a child, being faced with failure was almost unfathomable. He'd treated the application process lightly, sure, but he'd thought that his skill would have carried him through. For the first time, he had realized that he wasn't as smart as he thought he was, as accomplished as he thought he was, and it hurt. Life had handed him almost everything on a silver platter at that point, and then used it to smack him in the gut. Meanwhile, his peers were talking about their plans after graduation. Having gone to a private school, even some of the partiers were going to the best schools in Australia, and even those of them who weren't going to good colleges seemed to be okay. They were joking and laughing about how they had no idea what they were doing, where in life they were going.

And he envied them. Envied them for being so flippant, for allowing themselves to ride through the rest of their lives on their parents' money. Nevertheless, he needed to go somewhere. Hell if he was taking a gap year-- it would have been like admitting defeat. So he bit the bullet and enrolled in the Rochester Institute of Technology. A good school, but not good enough for him. He'd spent so much of his life being the best that being anything but was almost unfathomable. So college began, he flew back to America, and he maintained the same facade. The first few months of college were a blur. He weaved in and out of daily life, making acquaintance after acquaintance but no real friends. He went to class and was a straight-A student, but otherwise he felt unfulfilled. Unaccomplished. Was this what his life was going to amount to, being a drone? Being just another dot in the sea of people?

Sometime in January, Neil realized that if he was going to go somewhere from this point, he was going to have to do something about it.

He'd made a friend while doing some online college classes. Her name was Kristen, and the two of them had forged some sort of connection. They'd spoken on and off on Facebook for a while, but one random conversation during a particularly lonely night led to another, and another after that. Without realizing it, they found themselves becoming closer and closer, and soon they were making plans to get the hell out. To meet up in California, to take back control of the lives that they had planned out for themselves. Neil's father had a couple of contacts in Google, and he managed to connect him. The higher-ups approved of his resume and liked his interview. By the time May rolled around, Neil found himself hopping onto a plane to Los Angeles to begin his life anew. This would be his second chance, his chance to set things straight. To embark on the journey he'd always expected his life to be.

( Fingers crossed. )