JANIS MITCHELL | 29 / 120 | BOOK STORE OWNER | HARRY LLOYD
TRAITS
+ charismatic, outgoing, altruistic, clever - judgmental, doesn’t like being alone, disorganized, rarely impressed
MUTATION
Immortality and Mediumship. Janis stopped aging at twenty-nine because that was the age when he died. If he had made it to his mid-forties without dying, then his body would have naturally stopped aging. Janis also cannot be killed (with the exception of burning and decapitation), but he can be injured – except that he tends to heal quite quickly from the injuries (but it will hurt a lot despite it not threatening his life). He can also see and communicate with the dead.
BACKGROUND
Living forever seemed like the greatest gift of all, and yet it was the biggest of curses. At least for Janis it was.
Being born into a family of wealthy icons, Janis never knew what it was like to suffer for money. He was practically given everything at birth. From cars, to clothes, to all the money he asked for, but to his parents this was the one reason why they had had Janis in the first place. His parents would shower him with gifts every now and then. Needless to say, he was brought to this world as a little prince – the only thing he needed was a small ring and a crown to really believe he was royalty. As he grew older, however, his father started expecting more from him. His studies had gotten harder, and he needed to keep the name of the Mitchell family as one of the top in watches and clocks.
But Janis’ passion lay elsewhere. He was in love with the way the fabrics of one’s clothes felt against his skin, and he loved the way one could cut a piece of fabric, stitch it back, and form a dress, or jacket, or pantaloons with it. Fashion was his calling, yet he couldn’t just dismiss his dear father’s vision. “Destiny is already written, I suppose” he just said to himself, and shoved the idea of taking a piece of fabric and turning it into something else to the corners of his mind.
It wasn’t only after Janis turned twenty that he flew out to Europe, escaping from the terrible summer in which tuberculosis became an epidemic, and in which both Mr. and Mrs. Mitchell surrendered their lives to, leaving the entire clock industry and inheritance to the young man. He soon was pressured into becoming a businessman, and a very tenacious one at that. He became an exemplar leader, yet he was harsh with his penalties whenever a worker did something wrong. He wouldn’t think twice of dismissing them from work for the week, only if they were lucky enough to keep their position.
The job had given him an air of power that he was quickly getting high on, yet that would change once he’d met the biggest star of his life: Lucien Valenzuela. He was tall, dark, and incredibly handsome. He was kind, he loved to read, and he loved children. He was a small designer himself, a man who had just started being recognized in the world of fashion. He’d started out as an apprentice of Coco Chanel herself, his Spanish and French roots giving him the most exquisite of tastes. Just like Janis, he was well-traveled, was a lover of good art and haute gastronomy, and had a knack for a well lived life in only the most luxurious of places. Needless to say, the connection was immediate, and in less than a month, they moved in together, assuming that they would live together forever.
But as how life sometimes surprises – and this time, it was not a very pleasant one – Lucien had fallen ill. His condition was not something that could be cured, however. He had started to become nostalgic of the past, he’d started drinking a little more than usual. He had become a sleepless machine that ran on books, alcohol, fake smiles, and sessions of crying under the covers as soon as Janis left for work. He was much too sick of this world, so one day, he decided to take his own life.
The tragedy of having a loved one die by their own hand was too great to understand. It was a nightmare. Like a corridor that never ended, Janis started to enter in his lover’s mindset. He couldn’t find the light, he couldn’t get to the end of the tunnel. He had tried, for years, to find someone else yet not man nor woman could take away the needle from his heart. He sold his father’s industry and kept the millions. He was lost. At twenty-nine, Janis decided to take a bullet to his head, thinking that it would all be over soon. But he couldn’t be more wrong. After all, this was only the beginning to his story.
After ten years trying to make out what had happened to him, he realized that he had not changed a bit since 1923. He didn’t know what was happening to him, in fact, he felt as if he were crazy. He felt like things were whispering in his mind, yet he couldn’t see anybody. He couldn’t yet accept the facts of the world. That he had survived the bullet. He had been hiding in his childhood home in Turkey for a while, submerged into the loop of time. None of the books he read could explain to him what he was suffering from, but he felt it was important. He felt the need to find out why it was that that bullet did not do anything to him.
In a way, he felt as if God had told him to do it: cut himself on purpose. It had been only an experiment, yet he couldn’t believe what had just happened in front of his eyes. His skin had healed up, his blood had only stained the skin a little, but his skin had healed up after seconds of having been cut. It was strange, and it was extremely disconcerting, yet it made sense. It made sense until he started talking to the dead, and these started to reply back.
It took him a total of fifteen years to go out into the world again and to just accept what he was. It took him twenty years, to open up the first and smallest “Don Quijote” book store in the world. He did it in tribute to his undying adoration for Lucien, who’d always loved the classic novel. And, little did he know, that this small book store had been built in a curious part of America that was now, in the 21st century, called Mutant Town.
Played by Des