JACOB MORGAN. 29. CIS MAN. HE/HIM is here! They’ve lived in Cascade for 2 MONTHS and currently reside in OLD CASCADE. JAKE is the OWNER of THE CALIFORNIA and frequently hears that they look a lot like JOE KEERY. Funny, huh? If ever caught by Letterboxd, they’d say MR. DEEDS is in their Top 4 and the theme song to their life’s soundtrack would be MONEY, MONEY, MONEY by ABBA.
STATS.
FULL NAME: Jacob Morgan "Jake Sheppard" NICKNAME(S): Jake BIRTHDAY: May 7th AGE: Twenty-Two BIRTHPLACE: Chicago, Illinois STAR SIGN: Taurus GENDER: Cis Man. PRONOUNS: He/him SEXUALITY: Heterosexual OCCUPATION: Secret Owner and operator of The California Movie Theater (Also secretly a millionaire; see backstory) THEME SONG: Money, Money, Money by ABBA
PHYSICAL.
FACE CLAIM: Joe Keery. HAIR COLOR: Brown. EYE COLOR: Green. HEIGHT: 6 foot″ TATTOOS: None. PIERCINGS: None
PERSONALITY.
POSITIVES (+): passionate, compassionate, adventurous NEGATIVES (-): stubborn, guarded, impulsive MORAL ALIGNMENT: Neutral good. FEARS: relationships that are built on false pretenses, people discovering his big secret, sharks ELEMENT: Earth. HOGWARTS HOUSE: gryffindor. DRUGS/ ALCOHOL/ SMOKING: no / yes / no AESTHETICS: the sound of an old film projector, a camera poised to capture that perfect image, a drawer full of letters that are themselves full of lies, eyes that watch every person you meet with the strange mix of apprehension and the desire to connect on a personal level
BACKSTORY.
Death, Injury TW
I found this group in the tags, and I really said to myself "What wacky and fun things could I do with my muses to really make the most of this amazing concept of a city full of weird?" For my other character, Billy, I settled on a crazy marriage plot/connection that I'm excited to share and submit to the main soon enough. But for my man Jake here? I went really crazy with him and decided that I was going to make him a secret millionaire.
So the backstory: Jake was always that guy who made friends easily throughout his life. He was naturally likeable, had a lot of compassion for people no matter what walk of life they came from, and he knew how to have a good time. He graduated high school, not with the best grades or any spectacular accomplishments, but with a lot of people who he could call friends. And really, that's all he wanted at the end of the day.
He went to college on a football scholarship, but ended up getting injured halfway through his sophomore year and losing that scholarship, forcing him to drop out. Still, in his time in college, he'd made even more friends, and so, thanks to his many connections, he was able to find work pretty easily. He worked a bunch of different jobs throughout the better part of his twenties, always ending his employment on good terms and with a new reference, before he moved onto something else. He was really just trying to find something that felt like his calling, and while there were some jobs he did that he liked, none of them ever felt like that to him. Sure, he had things he was passionate about, like music, and old movies, and photography, and being outdoors, but he couldn't see a way that he could realistically make a living with any of those things.
And then, one day, his entire life changed in the blink of an eye.
Jake had never really known his Dad's side of the family, since his Dad had passed when he was pretty young and had been estranged from his Mother prior to his birth. So, he had never known that he had a Great Uncle who was extremely wealthy, until he was contacted and informed that his Great Uncle Albert had passed away, and as his closest living relative, he was now the heir to a fortune of right around 80 million dollars.
This really should have been the end of all of Jake's worries, but, unfortunately, it was more like where they began. People he had known for years started acting differently towards him now that he was rich, and new people that came into his life were only interested in the money, not the person. And then there was the heartbreak; he met the woman of his dreams, started dating her, and proposed, only to discover a few short days before they were going to be married that everything she'd told him about herself was a lie, and that she was only marrying him to take his money. Devastated by how this fortune he'd inherited had revealed the absolute worst in people, Jake decided he needed to make some big changes, and he needed to make them immediately.
The first change that Jake knew he needed to make was to move away from everyone who had ever known him and start over. So, he moved across the country to a kooky little city called Cascade, chosen because he fell in love with the old movie theater The California that happened to be for sale, and started going by the name Jake Sheppard. He also knew that unless he wanted the same thing to happen to him again, he needed to live his life as though he was a normal guy, and not let anyone know that he was rich. So, even though he owns the movie theater, he works in it as though he doesn't, and is just an employee there. He lives above the theatre in a small apartment, and from the outside looking in, it would be almost impossible to tell that he was actually extremely rich.
Since starting his new life here in Cascade, Jake has been coming to terms with what happened back home in Chicago. He's still as friendly and kind as he ever was, but he's, understandably, a bit wary of letting people get close to him again. He wants to believe that maybe he'll meet people that he will one day feel like he can trust enough to open up to and allow to know the real him, but right now he isn't sure if he really does believe that will happen or not. But despite his jadedness, he's still got a very good heart, and so he's still willing to put his wealth towards helping people, so long as no one ever discovers that he's the one doing it.
Message me if you would like to plot things! Sorry this intro is kinda bleh but I don't wanna waste too much time on it. I'm sure you get the gist: genuinely kind and likeable boy inherits fortune, learns people suck, decides to move across country and pretend to not be rich. It's Mr. Deeds with a twist basically.
