IMPEDIO SOCIETY. BONHEUR, JACQUES ARISTIDE

Male

Bisexual, though claims to be asexual.

Forty Eight

December 15th, 1963

French

French, and English with an accent.

Doctor, Dr. Bonheur, only referred to as Jack by people who’ve known him for a while.

0.50

Inpedio Society

n/a

The Hippocratic Suggestion

11/17/2013 - Jess

Renegade!

Oskenon:ton
Kun Shui Wei
Jun Shi Wei
Pasha Mikhaylichenko-Molotov

Very Low

THE MEDIC from TEAM FORTRESS 2

Jacques can definitely afford a better place to stay, but by all means, he likes to keep things simple. Large spaces make him uneasy, so he bought up a small apartment just outside of downtown LA that was relatively cheap. The neighbourhood is a little too crowded and a little too loud at night, but that’s how he likes it. He isn’t used to the quiet lull at any time, and the sound of people nearby is a small comfort in such a drastically different place.

His apartment is furnished rather exotically, which comes as a bit of a surprise to those who know him. He has bits and pieces of faraway places hung on walls or littering desks and book shelves. There is an African mask or two over the couch, a small bamboo plant on his kitchen counter, a rice paddy hat in his bedroom and various other things tastefully placed about. Jacques has collected small things from every place he’s been to, and he likes to keep the reminders in his home. There’s a metal stand, a violin case and a bookshelf full of folders of sheet music sitting in one corner of his living room.

One interesting feature of his household is in his bedroom; Jacques is an owner of an azabache colombian boa that sits in a very large cabinet-terrarium among the knick-knacks and antiques. His sheets are oddly patterned and bright, probably some traditional design from one culture or another.

Jacques is a very neat, clean-cut looking gentleman. He’s respectable as people would say, and even more so when his looks are attached to the title of ‘doctor’. His hair is brown-black, though it’s starting to speckle salt-and-pepper around his temples with age and he hasn’t bothered to do touch-ups. He keeps himself clean shaven with a straight razor of all things, and he grooms himself a little better than most men.

He stands at 5’10” and is relatively lean; Jacques occasionally goes to the gym to keep himself in shape, and he can’t stand the feeling of remaining still for too long. He looks to greatly favour his left side when it comes to everything; he’s even learned to write with his left hand because of the numbness despite functionality in his right.

His clothes often consist of neat suits and ties, white shirts and dress pants that are finely pressed to a sharp edge. A long trench coat isn’t uncommon in cooler weather, and occasionally he’s seen in a white lab coat, especially if he just got off from work. Casual clothes aren’t really a thing for him, and he perhaps owns one pair of jeans.

Under his clothes, some things might be explained about him even without knowing him. There are small ‘flecks’ that litter his right side, loosely dispersed and random on his skin. If it weren’t for some of the longer ones that look like they go all around his side, people might just mistake them for freckles. They’re really shrapnel scars, and he doesn’t ever talk about it.

Jacques’ eyes are sharp, bright blue, though some would notice that he turns his head a little when he tries to focus on something. He has glasses, but only the left lens is real; he’s almost completely blind in his right eye and often needs to move his center of focus to his left. He can sort of see lights and shadows, but it’s all very vague and unreliable.

Jacques has worked most of his life out of his own choice, either because he wants his actions to have impact, or because he feels suddenly directionless. Either way, he wants to keep busy, more recently to keep his mind off darker things.

Most of his work at a younger age included volunteering, and he often worked within the university in the labs and such while he attended medical school. Afterwards, he quickly signed up to work with the United Nations as a medic. Despite it being a dangerous job, he greatly enjoyed his work there.

After his discharge from the United Nations, he was contacted by the Impedio Society and sent to LA, where they needed a head doctor. While there, went to work in LA at the Cedar-Sinai Hospital as well. The long shifts and hustle was draining but not enough to keep old thoughts at bay.

To put it lightly, Jacques is always working. If he’s not at the hospital, he’s at the IS headquarters infirmary and rarely seen anywhere else or out of his white lab coat.

Some would say Jacques is complex, others would say he’s difficult while others still say he’s just stuck in his own head. Perhaps it’s a bit of everything no matter how he tries to swing himself in any specific direction, and by that meaning none at all.

When first meeting him, Jacques seems a bit distant. Perhaps it’s because he’s newer to the country, though he quickly denies that. He says it’s because he’s a doctor at Cedars-Sinai Hospital (and the IS, though he never says so), and that he sees so much during each enormously long shift that he’s just dead exhausted and barely responsive. Still, quick chatter will make him open up a little more, and a couple smiles do wonders.

It’s a lie, though. He smiles and chats with patients, other doctors, nurses and whoever bothers when he’s not busy. Still, despite working with coworkers for quite a few years, he considers them just as equal as acquaintances. He wants to make friends and he tried rather hard at it when he first started working, but there’s a huge mental block in his head that stops him dead in his tracks before his attempts get far.

The mental block is namely some very major trust issues. A traumatic career and a troubled past with other people with a broken off engagement on top lead him into finding it very difficult to connect to people on an emotional level. He can get very close to someone, but upon realizing it, quickly retreats into his head and more or less deny them access to anything more intimate. It’s most involuntary, and he’s tried to overcome it multiple times with little to no success. He can pretend, though. He’s become very, very good at pretending. He smiles a lot and talks to people freely unless the topic encroaches on himself. As long as the person doesn’t pry into his side or try to “get to know him”, so to speak, he’s perfectly fine with being with people.

Jacques is a very altruistic individual, however. Despite being born into a family of the Impedio Society, he thought that there had to be a better way of helping people. He assists where he can despite a constant state of exhaustion, and he’ll even step out of his way to show kindness to someone who might need it. It’s one of the reasons he wanted to work with the United Nations as a medic, despite the long deployments and generally low pay. He’s proven that he’s willing to give up a lot to help utter strangers.

Because of his work, he’s all but given up on many of his old hobbies. All of them, that is, except the violin. Whenever he’s at home and not collapsed from exhaustion, he picks up his old violin and starts to play music off the top of his head, though he has a bookshelf of sheet music tucked in the corner. When he cooks, he likes to play recordings of classical pieces; as long as it’s not completely quiet, he’s at ease.

He always feels the need to be doing something meaningful. As of recent, his life has taken on quite a bit of misdirection and he feels lost, which doesn’t help his mental state at all. He tries to keep his mind off it by working endlessly. Jacques clearly thinks that whoever said pain and sadness makes one creative is full of shit. Creativity only makes his wounds fester, and drowning himself in repetitive tasks eases him.

Jacques stays away from rings and roses, and Valentine’s Day is a sore spot because it makes his heart ache for someone he’s lost. He’s long ago buried his trust in people and forsaken relationships entirely. His so-called ‘asexuality’ is really just another effort to keep people from getting into his head. He’s well aware that there’s plenty of things wrong and not enough right, but he’s fallen into a hole so deep that he can’t dig himself out.

Though never formally diagnosed, Jacques likely suffers from posttraumatic stress disorder. The cause could likely be pinned on multiple things, mainly having to do with his time with the UN. His main symptoms lean heavily towards re-experiencing his traumatic events. He keeps himself so busy because it keeps his mind off everything else: his broken engagement, his lack of trust in people and his time in various war zones. To say the least, he’s seen some shit, and it’s constantly sitting in the back of his mind, eager to come back to the surface if he’s not always busy with something.

The reoccurring nightmares are the worst. His exhaustion keeps him from getting full blown insomnia and he utterly collapses whenever he gets home, but his sleep is riddled with the sounds of gunfire, shouting and a single dropped ring. He wakes up in a cold sweat every time, hesitant to go back to sleep at all, but he has to eventually or else he knows he’ll drop on the job. The process repeats itself, and he finds himself waking up every couple of hours, only once or twice a night if he’s lucky.

Jacques’ flashbacks are hard to deal with during the day, which is why he tries to keep himself busy and keep them at bay. He sort of feels them coming on, though; it’s a tingle on his right side, probably phantom, as he knows a lot of the major nerves there have been cut by flying metal. He locks himself up whenever he thinks it’s happening or, if he thinks he has time, tries to run home. Either way, he isolates himself. He tries to find a place he can be alone so he can curl up and cry or smash plates or whatever it is that he feels like he needs an outlet for. He's a grown man, he tells himself, yet he always ends up pathetic or uncontrollably violent and he wouldn't wish it on anybody. He doesn't emerge for hours.

He doesn’t want to be reminded. He wears himself to the bone because he doesn’t want anything to trigger something in his head that would send an avalanche of memories back into his mind. If anybody brings up the current conflicts around the world, he’ll quickly excuse himself. Nobody’s tried to push it yet, but it’s bound to someday and he’s quite afraid that he’ll just explode when it does happen. The most common ‘reminder’ is when people ask why he tends to turn his head when things are on his right side; he’s blind on that side, but when asked, he gets upset. Most just eventually (correctly) assume blindness and don’t ask anymore.

His jumpiness gets worse as he lets his thoughts simmer in the back of his mind. Things that don’t even make sense remind him of things he doesn’t want to remember, either of his time with the UN or his ex-fiancée, and that scares him greatly. It could be the smallest of things, like the placement of a coffee mug on a coaster or how a newspaper is folded.

Jacques is slowly growing into a realization that it isn’t going to go away.

Jacques was born in Toulouse, France to a very average looking couple. There isn’t much to say about the youngest years of his life, except that he spent a lot of time being fussy and a lot of time keeping his parents up at night, as most babies tended to do. His terrible twos were perhaps a little less terrible than average, because he was a smart kid and quickly realized his parents believed wholeheartedly in spanking when he did something bad.

His parents ingrained into him the fact that he was always free to ask them questions. Any questions. Uncomfortable questions or weird questions, there were zero taboos when it came to simple curiousity. He leapt onto this offer zealously ever since he was a child, and he asked more and more until one day, he asked a single question that triggered a radical change in his view of the world.

Most children are frightened of the monsters in their closets and under their beds, but other children have parents who assured them they weren’t real. Whenever he got spooked by the night, his parents told him it was just natural, human thing. Therefore, it was only about time when he asked his parents if monsters were real, and why they seemed so unbothered by it.

His mother and father took them to the reading room in their home, sat him down and brought out an old book. There was a lot to be said, and being rather young, his parents simplified it as best as they could until he got older and could learn for himself. He doesn’t remember much of what they said, but two things were mentioned that would continue fueling his curiousity until he was much older; the Impedio Society (which he was too young to understand immediately) and monsters were real. Monsters were very real, and hidden just out of reach. It was normal, but nobody mentioned it, and so he shouldn’t either.

Being a good boy, he never did. The few times he did let it slip on accident, his peers and teachers just thought of it as a boy with an overactive imagination. However, he kept asking questions as he grew older. He learned little by little, spending hours sitting in the family reading room and looking over the old books on secret histories and ancient kingdoms. He asked his parents, whom he soon learned were both a part of the Impedio Society, about their place in the world and why they had to wage war against the ancient kingdoms and the monsters that lurked. His father would often sit with him while he read, just to answer any questions that were thrown his way.

With more questions and more answers, Jacques found that he liked the implications less and less. Sure, the Impedio Society was there to help people and they were doing good, but nobody did evil because it was evil. There had to be another way, he thought as he grew into his teens and started a sort of IS ‘training program’ that sent him back and forth between the French countryside and the city. He was withdrawn from public school and started being tutored at home, which he definitely didn’t like.

From the get-go, Jacques immediately found great interest in the field of science, which quickly narrowed down to medicine. The Impedio Society needed medics and doctors, his parents said. They always needed medical professionals because of the danger of some of the work. In utter honesty, Jacques couldn’t really care less about what the IS needed. He wanted to do something the rest of the world needed, not just one small slice of humanity. He wanted to help, he wanted his work to be meaningful, and so that was his set-in-stone goal. He’d become a doctor.

Much of his teenage years were lost in an utter blur of flying numbers, diagrams of the human body, beakers of funny smelling chemicals and parents who’d become fairly often absent. Now that Jacques was old enough to handle himself, his parents started working with the IS more. He didn’t mind this; being privately schooled left him with few friends for distraction, and his curiousity was motivation enough.

As soon as he was out of high school, he applied to a baccalaureate in sciences, majoring in life sciences. Those years were spent with his nose shoved in a book and little time for anything else. He tried to distance himself more and more from the IS at that point in his life, though he couldn’t help but feel mildly hopeless whenever one of his peers mentioned a problem that he knew was the cause of a monster, but he couldn’t say a single thing or offer help.

Next was his PCEM which consisted of two years, and the first step in becoming a medical doctor in France. His single-minded dedication impressed his parents, though they weren’t very pleased with him trying to detach himself from the IS. He passed the competitive exam, and went into his DCEM studies with unrelenting zeal. Many of his friends were burning out by that point, but he hadn’t, which he thought was a miracle on itself. Finally, the ‘third cycle’ of his medical training came along, and he quickly chose the slightly longer Internat route. During the years of his third cycle, he began to look into various hospitals, clinics and even the army, which was when he came into contact with the United Nations and seriously considered a job with them.

His years in medical school were fueled by coffee and catching sleep with his head on the desk in the libraries whenever he could. He grew thin, wearing himself down to the bone, the high competitiveness and stress of the environment exhausted him, but the promise of having an effect on people’s lives egged him on.

Four years of university and nine years of medical school later, he took his Hippocratic Oath in front of a jury and received his DES. He felt on top of the world.

Jacques already knew what he wanted to do. He quickly drew up the contacts in the UN he had made during his Internat studies and applied for a job under field service as a medical doctor. His obligations to the IS were forgotten, and he left them quickly with a promise to never reveal the secret histories or creatures to anybody. His parents were probably the only ones disappointed, as he didn’t regret a thing.

Working for the United Nations in the field would make up the fondest, happiest memories he had. His work sent him to many places, mainly in Africa but not discounting locations in Asia. He was battered back and forth in the field, and he was reminded of why he took his Hippocratic Oath every day. He was put into both understaffed hospitals and into the middle of conflicted war zones, and all the while, he helped anybody he could, no matter what side they were on. It was during these times that his basic training with the IS came into handy, though he tried to use guns and combat very minimally.

It was while he was stationed in Eritrea did his life take on quite a change, though he couldn’t ever say for sure whether it made him better or worse in the end. He met a woman named Laura, and to say the least, he was absolutely stupid for her, and she seemed quite the same for him. Despite the harsh conditions of their work, him being a medic and her stationed nearby as part of the army, they had a romance of close to two years, which resulted in Jacques putting an engagement ring on her finger.

They were apart more often than not, unfortunately. He was sent to different corners of the globe and away from Laura to work, but they tried to keep in contact whenever possible and celebrated the moments that they were brought back together. The last time this happened was in Sudan during the mission as part of a relief effort, and it was the blow that proved fatal to their relationship.

Sudan was in the throes of the Second Sudanese Civil War when the United Nations came in to help, and both Jacques and Laura were stationed there in the field. Turmoil and conflict ran rampant, but by that point in time, both of them were fairly hardened from their years of work. Traveling from one checkpoint to another was a very routine task, so they thought nothing of it in their convoy.

Jacques says he doesn’t remember much of what happened next, which is a lie. He remembers, but he doesn’t want to recall. It’s the part of his life that plagues his dreams and throws him into the deepest pits of his mind. There was an explosion; the convoy had run into several scattered landmines, and the party went up more or less like matchsticks. Jacques suffered shrapnel wounds across his whole right side, including shards in his eye. He lay in the dirt with the rest of them, stunned.

And then his training kicked in, and he dragged himself up. There were quite a few injured personnel, but a couple that were in some state to move around. Despite the resounding pain and the inability to see out of his right eye, he tried to help whoever was within reach with whatever materials that hadn’t burned. He found Laura, injured and unable to get up, but alive. The few people that could aided those that couldn’t move until help arrived.

There was only one or two dead; everybody else made it alive, more or less, and were carted off to emergency hospitals. Jacques himself had to go into surgery and when he woke up the doctors explained to him that he’d received extensive nerve and tissue damage on his right side, and they couldn’t save his right eye, but he’d be fine. He’d experience numbness on that side, but everything was more or less functional.

Jacques was back in action soon enough, but Laura wasn’t. He asked throughout his recovery if she was alright, and if he could speak to her. Every time, the answer was yes, she was fine but she wouldn’t talk to him. He thought this was because she was feeling quite shaken up and left her alone. That was, until he got the letter from her.

In the letter, Laura apologized for not speaking to him. She explained what was going through her mind, how she still loved him, and how proud of him she was when he helped all those people. However, she just couldn’t take working in the army anymore. She was too shaken up, she’d seen too much, and she knew it was her time to go, or risk doing harm to herself or to others. She didn’t want to have anything to do with it all anymore, and she didn’t want reminders. In the last paragraph, she apologized again, and broke off the engagement. Her ring was in the envelope.

He tried calling her, begging her to reconsider and tried to convince her that they could make it work. Laura was a strong willed woman, and she stood her ground. It was over. She was very sorry that it had to end like that, but it was over and they should both move on.

She faded into obscurity, answering his calls less and less until she stopped altogether. Jacques knew he couldn’t change her mind and in the end, the best he could do was let her be. With a heavy heart, he promised to never purposefully contact her again, unless she did first.

Life always found a way, he tried to tell himself. He was a doctor, he’d make it find a way, damn it. He went back to work, pining away in the back of his mind while putting on a smile. Some of his colleagues asked him where his ring went, and he simply told them that things got complicated until they stopped asking. Eventually, they started asking him why he suddenly seemed so jumpy, and he dismissed it, citing a lack of sleep.

Jacques started becoming rather… shaken, as some people might describe it. He was jittery a whole lot, and seemed more easily surprised than in the past. Nightmares plagued him, keeping him from getting the proper amount of sleep. Jacques himself thought that it was because of his heartache, but heartache didn’t cause edginess to the point where he was starting to lash out. Heartache didn’t give him flashes of memory to the various atrocities he’d witnessed, and heartache didn’t cause him to pace endlessly unless he wanted to be plagued with bad memories and a sense of unease.

His superiors started to take notice. He was required to speak to a couple psychologists and a few other professionals to see if he was stable enough to continue the field work, and he fought them tooth and nail the whole way. His job was the one joy he had in his life, and he’d be damned if he was going to give it up after so much work.

Jacques remained in service for another couple of years until they finally gathered enough evidence to hand him a letter of polite dismissal. They thanked him for his time and for everything he put into the UN, but there was increasing indication that he was growing quite infirm, and under pressure, that couldn’t happen. They implored that he sought further help, and that they may consider giving him his position back at a later date.

He was packed up and sent home back to France, now directionless. He’d lost his purpose and didn’t have a clue as to what to do with himself until he heard from something he hadn’t thought of in years.

Jacques was contacted by the Impedio Society, something that had sat in the very fringes of his mind since he left when he was hired by the UN. They heard of his recent fallout and offered him a solution; they were in need of a doctor in Los Angeles, and if he proved himself able to work, they could promote him to head doctor after a year or so. In an already fragile state of mind and with nowhere to go, he accepted a little too quickly and was once again packed up and sent to the United States.

Working for the Impedio Society was uncomfortable at first, to say the least. He was a very realistic, practical sort of man, especially since he got into medicine. Things needed to be proven, and admitting the existence of monsters once more was hard, even though he knew it was all real. Several months in, he took yet another job at Cedar-Sinai Hospital. The time he had off gave him too much room for his mind to wander, and every time it was the same. There were the urges of panic, the confusion, the sudden fear that gripped and shook him as he swore he heard the sound of gunshots and twisting metal just outside his window.

He worked for about a year before he was promoted to head doctor in the LA branch. Though the society was well aware of what plagued him, as long as he was a reasonable doctor that was actually able to piece people together, he was well suited. There was even more work, and he was happier for it. He had no time to think anymore; quiet was non-existent for him.

Doctors are required to take the Hippocratic Oath upon becoming certified, and Jacques was no different. The Hippocratic Suggestion, on the other hand, is cryptic compared to its fellow document.

The paper is frayed and yellow with age, bound in a crusty, worn out leather without a single thing on the cover. When opening the thick document, no matter which page it is, there is the Hippocratic Oath written in its original Ancient Greek. The next page turned, also no matter which page it is opened to, will have the words “Hippocratic Suggestions” in a faded ink.

After that, the pages fill out like an ancient medical textbook. The writing is in curled penmanship and suggests remedies and describes ailments to any and all living things, be they human, beast or monster. It is an excellent reference text when Jacques is trying to figure out where, exactly, the heart of the dead monster lying on the autopsy table in front of him is, among other things.



Though the Hippocratic Suggestion is an excellent guide to the anatomy, illnesses and functions of human and monsters alike, it will not be too pleased when the person it is bonded to breaches it’s contract. If the person the tomb is bonded to harms another living being, no matter how small or insignificant, within a ten meter range of itself, the Hippocratic Suggestion will inflict upon the person whatever was on the last page it was turned to.

Whatever is inflicted will last for twenty four hours and then disappear without a trace. The person will not die from the ailment no matter how serious, but will suffer through it.

For example, if Jacques last looked up the bubonic plague and then killed a mouse while standing near the book, he will soon come down with a fever, swelling of the lymph glands, seizures and gangrene. He’ll seem like he’s on the very cusp of death and suffer through it for twenty four hours before all the symptoms will recede and it will seem that nothing had ever happened.