Post by Cass van der Berg on May 27, 2009 9:36:47 GMT
Name: Caspar Michaël van der Berg. But this is a little bit of a mouthful, so his friends call him Cass.
Age: Eighteen. (Birthday: 19/8/90)
Physical Description: Cass is a beanpole – six foot four, and very, very skinny to go with it. It looks very unhealthy at first sight, but a couple of minutes’ observation makes it pretty obvious that that’s just the way he’s built – he looks healthy, otherwise. He has very clear, pale skin, but it’s the Germanic version of pale skin, not the British - it can get tanned; straight, white teeth (the products of two years of orthodontistry); dark blue eyes that are bright despite being hidden behind thick-rimmed glasses; and a mass of curly blonde hair. [A/N: the astute may notice that the face I have chosen for Cass does not wear these glasses – let’s just say he takes them off for photos, or something like that. Use your imagination XD]
He is not a hugely attractive person – his eyes are just slightly too close together, his nose a little too thin (although very straight), and his mouth slightly too big. Speaking of his mouth, his smile is lopsided: he has a lazy smile which only involves lifting one corner. He only grins symmetrically when he is very happy.
He has a fairly strong jaw with a cleft chin, and as for the rest of the bony structure of the face it’s more or less standard in terms of cheekbones, brow, etc.
Clothing Description: Cass dresses practically for his work. None of his clothes are particularly fine and none get in his way. His typical outfit tends to be formed of faded T-shirts, some with slogans on them (his favourite reads ”Keep the dream alive: Hit the snooze button.”) and some with band logos, and jeans, which are invariably too baggy on him and so have to be held up with a belt. When he remembers to put shoes on, they are always the same pair of battered up trainers: what is the point in having more than one pair? Cass has better things to spend his money on than clothes.
Personality: The main aspect of Cass’s character – and the one that is most quickly noticed by just about anyone – is that he is, as Kennedy Delaney put it, “so laid back he’s practically falling over.” He takes a downright Zen approach to many things which may cause great concern or irritation to other people: school, his future, money, homework, malfunctioning pieces of technology…
That being said, Cass does worry about things – or, not things, but people. People are the only thing worth worrying about, in his own humble opinion. That is why, unlike his schoolwork, he does take his work in the hospital very seriously, and he acts as a kind of sounding board for all his friends’ problems. His role in his group of friends is very clear: he does not meddle and he does not offer advice, but he listens. This may seem useless, but it is often helpful in that Cass is a very calming influence to have around – he doesn’t speak unnecessarily; when he does speak, he does so softly; he lets any distraught person say exactly what they need to without judging or berating or doing anything other than giving support. He believes that most of the time when people talk about their problems it’s not for a resolution or for some sort of magical advice that will fix anything; it’s just for the sake of being able to share it with someone else. And he is happy to do this for people, because Cass, in keeping with his group name, genuinely cares about nearly everybody in his acquaintance, even people who he barely knows. He’s a fixer =] Or, at least, he tries to be.
However, no matter how worried Cass may be, it is always tempered by two things: his belief that everything will sort itself out sooner or later, no matter what the situation, and his personality. Cass is not really capable of agitation, particularly in the outward sense. As a rule, he does not get angry with people. His laidback-ness makes him seem lazy, and maybe even slow. His typical languid movements come off as quite strange when one considers that one of his powers is super-speed, and his not speaking very often makes it seem like he has nothing to say. (“Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.”)
He isn’t really lazy: just slow-paced. Except, of course, when he’s playing his guitar, and this brings me nicely to another prominent character point – music. Music is the one great passion in Cass’s life and the one thing that he is truly good at. Cass is incredible on the guitar, as he uses his super-speed while he’s playing. At times, his playing can create the sound of two or even three guitars, and he sings pretty well, too, because while he doesn’t have a brilliant voice, he has such a good ear that he at least has the bonuses of always being in tune and fitting the melody in well with what he’s playing.
Of course, just because he can sing doesn’t mean he does: he’s pretty self-conscious about singing in front of other people. And he’s decidedly average-or-worse when it comes to everything apart from music (and some aspects of biology, but I’ll get to that later), which includes English, so none of his compositions or improvisations get
anywhere near having lyrics written for them.
History: Cass was born in Amsterdam in 1990 to one Elisabeth van der Berg and an unknown suitor of his mother’s – suitor, of course, being a very, very polite term for the man. In reality, Elisabeth was a prostitute, although Cass, naturally, was too innocent to realise this until he reached around the age of eight or nine years. Cass himself was the product of a particularly faulty piece of contraception.
He was raised in a brothel in the Red Light District by his mother and the rest of the ‘girls’, was taught at home and never really got a chance to meet children of his own age, other than his friends Bep and Coby – the offspring of two of the other girls. It wasn’t a bad life, or at least, he doesn’t think it was. He was well looked after. After all, the brothel was fairly affluent, all things considered, and the girls all looked out for each other and for their children: in some ways, it was just like an extended family. And Cass loved his mother hugely. He didn’t see her very much, but the times when he did were when both of them were happiest.
But there came a time when things weren’t always good. Once he turned eight, the times when they were together grew more and more infrequent, and when he did see her, she was different: sometimes absent, sometimes irritable, sometimes crying. Although he was still young, it became quickly evident to him that his mother was depressed, and he hated it. He wanted to fix it, but his fumbling early attempts at comfort were not met well.
The situation only got worse over the next four years, and Cass became withdrawn, constantly quietly obsessing over what was happening to his mother. He asked the other girls, but they wouldn’t tell him anything. It was during this time that Cass learnt to read people, but it still wasn’t enough: he could see more about his mother, he could make guesses as to what it was, but he still had no idea what had actually happened. The girls were good actresses, and they were unfairly good at keeping the information away from him. During this time Cass learnt to play the guitar; he needed to distract himself somehow. This is partly the reason for his complete dependence on his music now.
His powers manifested late, when he was twelve, and he and all who knew him were astounded. Elisabeth was not magical: the only possible conclusion was that his father had been, a fact which Cass greeted with some trepidation. He didn’t really like knowing things about his father – he preferred not to think of him as a person, just a nameless and faceless entity that would never have any effect in his life. This effect, however, was undeniable.
Elisabeth decided to send him to Orchid Hill for her own reasons, and Cass was surprised when, after years of secrets, he was told what these reasons were. The truth upset him. She would have sent him to the Magical Academy of Amsterdam, but it was close, and he would have to stay at home, and he would make friends who would want to come and visit and know his parents, and she didn’t want him discriminated against because of what his mother did. Despite his forceful affirmations that that didn’t matter, she was adamant, and so to Orchid he went.
He was placed in the Carers, quickly made friends with a good deal of people and, to put it lightly, flourished. The anxious habits and silence that had come down on him when his mother had changed melted away quickly, because, before, his mother had been a huge part of his world, but in this new place, with all these new people, hundreds of miles away, his world became such a varied and busy one that he was able to become a far more rounded person. He wrote to his mother, and with the letters she sent he was able to convince himself that she was becoming better, because there was only so much he could read into them: he analysed the words to death, but not seeing her say them, he couldn’t tell if they were lies or not. Cass, being generally positive in nature, decided to believe that they were true.
So passed three years, when into his life came the Delaney twins. Kennedy was placed in his dorm upon arrival, and, sensing that he had been saddled with a brooder who had no desire to come out of his shell any time soon, Cass didn’t try and befriend him immediately. However, Cass was surprised to see that Kennedy quickly shed this behaviour and, a week after arriving, initiated conversation with Cass, in which he told him that the smiling freckled girl that Cass had seen him with was his twin sister Sally, and he told him a little of their life and their parents. Cass liked him immediately.
A couple of nights later, Cass met Kennedy’s sister, Sally-who-was-really-called-Lynn, under slightly more strenuous circumstances (“Breathe”), and on this occasion they christened each other with their new nicknames – up until now, he had always been known as Caspar, but Lynn’s Cass stuck. His Lynnie didn’t stay so well, but later, when they started dating, he was glad that he was the only person who called her that.
There was a period of around a year and a half before Cass asked Lynn out, because he kept changing his mind and making decisions tends to be something that happens very slowly for Cass, if he has his way about it. But eventually he did ask her, and it was easy, and she did say yes, and their relationship actually changed remarkably little: the transition came as easily as breathing.
He loved Lynn in a thousand different ways. More than anything else, he loved her because of what she did. He never completely found out about her past, but he knew that it was there: he could see that the easy smiles that usually spread over her face weren’t as easy as he had assumed. Every day, she was making herself stay happy, and it was obvious why she was doing it, too – she was doing it for Kennedy. It was this fact that made Cass love her more than anything else, because he knew what that felt like; he’d done it for his mother for years.
In May of 2008, he received a letter from his mother that explained everything and ruined everything in one fell swoop. His mother told him that when he was eight, she had tested HIV+, and that now, the doctors had told her the disease had finally developed into full-blown AIDS. She was scared; she had tried to protect him, but she was scared, and now she wanted him home.
He had no choice. He wasn’t sure if he even wanted one. Within a week he was back in Amsterdam, alone.
He didn’t do too badly there. He didn’t stay at home with the girls; his mother was in hospital, so he stayed at the Magical University of Amsterdam. He made friends there, and he was settling in well, although he missed his friends at Orchid. He knew his mother was going to die, and he accepted that, and most of his efforts went into making her last days as comfortable as possible: it isn’t Cass’s way to rail against fate. He visited her every night, and their relationship was the strongest it had been since he was eight years old. He dreaded her death on his behalf, but welcomed it on hers – he didn’t want her to suffer anymore.
The final blow came two days before the last battle. Gradually it became more and more evident that she was not going to leave the hospital again, and after a while, her organs started to fail. He didn’t leave her side for the last week of her life, although she was rarely conscious.
When she did die, Cass was an utter wreck. He had known it was coming, and he’d partly wanted it to come, but wanting was different from getting. He’d only lost his mother, but, suddenly, he felt like he’d lost everything. All of the resentment that he’d bottled up at having to leave Orchid and his friends came to the surface in his grief, and despite the fact that he had made friends in Amsterdam, he felt alone, because he didn’t feel like anybody needed him to be there. Luckily for him, he only had to wait a couple of days for an excuse to go running back – two days after his mother’s death and one hour after her funeral, he had finally decided that the time had come for him to tell people what had happened, so he tried to phone his friends in Orchid. None answered their mobiles but his friend Jamie Mason, Academic, who informed him of Madeleine’s kidnapping. And he did not wait a moment. He took his guitar, and a change of clothes, and within hours he was back in Britain.
By the time he’d got there, he had composed himself, feeling lucky that he was able to get back to his friends at all and feeling that there’d be no place for his grief in a school which was panicking about the kidnapping of one of its leaders and the injuries and deaths of multitudes of Warriors and Spies. He pushed the grief away again – Cass is good at denial. And on his arrival at Orchid Cass almost immediately got back to doing what he had missed so much in Amsterdam: caring.
Gifts: The first two are air and super-speed, but he is far more gifted with the latter than the former.
His third power is the one that fitted him into his particular group: diagnosis. He cannot heal, but he can ‘see’ inside the human body. He can see the internal organs, and he has an instinctive knowledge of what the inside of the body is supposed to be like. When he finds an illness, he instinctively knows two other things: what is wrong with the part of the body, and what needs to be done to fix it.
However, unfortunately, his power of diagnosis does not come with an instinctive knowledge of the names which have been given to all the organs he knows so well or an instinctive knowledge of the names and jobs of all the different types of medicine. This power is fairly useless if he doesn’t know how to tell people what is wrong or what to do (he can’t cure anything on his own), so he has taken the initiative to read some books on anatomy and medicine and pay particular attention to his biology studies. That being said, though, Cass isn’t very scientific, so it’s an uphill struggle.
Other:
- Just a spot of clarification: in Holland, as everywhere else, the majority of television programmes are American, but as opposed to dubbing them, Dutch subtitles are shown at the bottom of the screen. As a result of this, the majority of Dutch people are able to speak near-perfect English, and Cass is no exception. His accent, however, is not American, because Orchid was the first place where he had to speak English regularly and so the only real intonation that comes through obviously in his voice is the Dutch.
- Over the years, Cass also picked up the piano, the cello and the double bass (although his technique in the latter two is such that it would make any experienced cellist/bassist burst into tears). The guitar is still his favourite, though.
- His friend Jamie Mason has given him the distinction of giving The Best Hugs in the World; an award which most people who have experienced a Cass-hug find they have to agree with.
Pets: None.
Group: Carers.
Age: Eighteen. (Birthday: 19/8/90)
Physical Description: Cass is a beanpole – six foot four, and very, very skinny to go with it. It looks very unhealthy at first sight, but a couple of minutes’ observation makes it pretty obvious that that’s just the way he’s built – he looks healthy, otherwise. He has very clear, pale skin, but it’s the Germanic version of pale skin, not the British - it can get tanned; straight, white teeth (the products of two years of orthodontistry); dark blue eyes that are bright despite being hidden behind thick-rimmed glasses; and a mass of curly blonde hair. [A/N: the astute may notice that the face I have chosen for Cass does not wear these glasses – let’s just say he takes them off for photos, or something like that. Use your imagination XD]
He is not a hugely attractive person – his eyes are just slightly too close together, his nose a little too thin (although very straight), and his mouth slightly too big. Speaking of his mouth, his smile is lopsided: he has a lazy smile which only involves lifting one corner. He only grins symmetrically when he is very happy.
He has a fairly strong jaw with a cleft chin, and as for the rest of the bony structure of the face it’s more or less standard in terms of cheekbones, brow, etc.
Clothing Description: Cass dresses practically for his work. None of his clothes are particularly fine and none get in his way. His typical outfit tends to be formed of faded T-shirts, some with slogans on them (his favourite reads ”Keep the dream alive: Hit the snooze button.”) and some with band logos, and jeans, which are invariably too baggy on him and so have to be held up with a belt. When he remembers to put shoes on, they are always the same pair of battered up trainers: what is the point in having more than one pair? Cass has better things to spend his money on than clothes.
Personality: The main aspect of Cass’s character – and the one that is most quickly noticed by just about anyone – is that he is, as Kennedy Delaney put it, “so laid back he’s practically falling over.” He takes a downright Zen approach to many things which may cause great concern or irritation to other people: school, his future, money, homework, malfunctioning pieces of technology…
That being said, Cass does worry about things – or, not things, but people. People are the only thing worth worrying about, in his own humble opinion. That is why, unlike his schoolwork, he does take his work in the hospital very seriously, and he acts as a kind of sounding board for all his friends’ problems. His role in his group of friends is very clear: he does not meddle and he does not offer advice, but he listens. This may seem useless, but it is often helpful in that Cass is a very calming influence to have around – he doesn’t speak unnecessarily; when he does speak, he does so softly; he lets any distraught person say exactly what they need to without judging or berating or doing anything other than giving support. He believes that most of the time when people talk about their problems it’s not for a resolution or for some sort of magical advice that will fix anything; it’s just for the sake of being able to share it with someone else. And he is happy to do this for people, because Cass, in keeping with his group name, genuinely cares about nearly everybody in his acquaintance, even people who he barely knows. He’s a fixer =] Or, at least, he tries to be.
However, no matter how worried Cass may be, it is always tempered by two things: his belief that everything will sort itself out sooner or later, no matter what the situation, and his personality. Cass is not really capable of agitation, particularly in the outward sense. As a rule, he does not get angry with people. His laidback-ness makes him seem lazy, and maybe even slow. His typical languid movements come off as quite strange when one considers that one of his powers is super-speed, and his not speaking very often makes it seem like he has nothing to say. (“Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.”)
He isn’t really lazy: just slow-paced. Except, of course, when he’s playing his guitar, and this brings me nicely to another prominent character point – music. Music is the one great passion in Cass’s life and the one thing that he is truly good at. Cass is incredible on the guitar, as he uses his super-speed while he’s playing. At times, his playing can create the sound of two or even three guitars, and he sings pretty well, too, because while he doesn’t have a brilliant voice, he has such a good ear that he at least has the bonuses of always being in tune and fitting the melody in well with what he’s playing.
Of course, just because he can sing doesn’t mean he does: he’s pretty self-conscious about singing in front of other people. And he’s decidedly average-or-worse when it comes to everything apart from music (and some aspects of biology, but I’ll get to that later), which includes English, so none of his compositions or improvisations get
anywhere near having lyrics written for them.
History: Cass was born in Amsterdam in 1990 to one Elisabeth van der Berg and an unknown suitor of his mother’s – suitor, of course, being a very, very polite term for the man. In reality, Elisabeth was a prostitute, although Cass, naturally, was too innocent to realise this until he reached around the age of eight or nine years. Cass himself was the product of a particularly faulty piece of contraception.
He was raised in a brothel in the Red Light District by his mother and the rest of the ‘girls’, was taught at home and never really got a chance to meet children of his own age, other than his friends Bep and Coby – the offspring of two of the other girls. It wasn’t a bad life, or at least, he doesn’t think it was. He was well looked after. After all, the brothel was fairly affluent, all things considered, and the girls all looked out for each other and for their children: in some ways, it was just like an extended family. And Cass loved his mother hugely. He didn’t see her very much, but the times when he did were when both of them were happiest.
But there came a time when things weren’t always good. Once he turned eight, the times when they were together grew more and more infrequent, and when he did see her, she was different: sometimes absent, sometimes irritable, sometimes crying. Although he was still young, it became quickly evident to him that his mother was depressed, and he hated it. He wanted to fix it, but his fumbling early attempts at comfort were not met well.
The situation only got worse over the next four years, and Cass became withdrawn, constantly quietly obsessing over what was happening to his mother. He asked the other girls, but they wouldn’t tell him anything. It was during this time that Cass learnt to read people, but it still wasn’t enough: he could see more about his mother, he could make guesses as to what it was, but he still had no idea what had actually happened. The girls were good actresses, and they were unfairly good at keeping the information away from him. During this time Cass learnt to play the guitar; he needed to distract himself somehow. This is partly the reason for his complete dependence on his music now.
His powers manifested late, when he was twelve, and he and all who knew him were astounded. Elisabeth was not magical: the only possible conclusion was that his father had been, a fact which Cass greeted with some trepidation. He didn’t really like knowing things about his father – he preferred not to think of him as a person, just a nameless and faceless entity that would never have any effect in his life. This effect, however, was undeniable.
Elisabeth decided to send him to Orchid Hill for her own reasons, and Cass was surprised when, after years of secrets, he was told what these reasons were. The truth upset him. She would have sent him to the Magical Academy of Amsterdam, but it was close, and he would have to stay at home, and he would make friends who would want to come and visit and know his parents, and she didn’t want him discriminated against because of what his mother did. Despite his forceful affirmations that that didn’t matter, she was adamant, and so to Orchid he went.
He was placed in the Carers, quickly made friends with a good deal of people and, to put it lightly, flourished. The anxious habits and silence that had come down on him when his mother had changed melted away quickly, because, before, his mother had been a huge part of his world, but in this new place, with all these new people, hundreds of miles away, his world became such a varied and busy one that he was able to become a far more rounded person. He wrote to his mother, and with the letters she sent he was able to convince himself that she was becoming better, because there was only so much he could read into them: he analysed the words to death, but not seeing her say them, he couldn’t tell if they were lies or not. Cass, being generally positive in nature, decided to believe that they were true.
So passed three years, when into his life came the Delaney twins. Kennedy was placed in his dorm upon arrival, and, sensing that he had been saddled with a brooder who had no desire to come out of his shell any time soon, Cass didn’t try and befriend him immediately. However, Cass was surprised to see that Kennedy quickly shed this behaviour and, a week after arriving, initiated conversation with Cass, in which he told him that the smiling freckled girl that Cass had seen him with was his twin sister Sally, and he told him a little of their life and their parents. Cass liked him immediately.
A couple of nights later, Cass met Kennedy’s sister, Sally-who-was-really-called-Lynn, under slightly more strenuous circumstances (“Breathe”), and on this occasion they christened each other with their new nicknames – up until now, he had always been known as Caspar, but Lynn’s Cass stuck. His Lynnie didn’t stay so well, but later, when they started dating, he was glad that he was the only person who called her that.
There was a period of around a year and a half before Cass asked Lynn out, because he kept changing his mind and making decisions tends to be something that happens very slowly for Cass, if he has his way about it. But eventually he did ask her, and it was easy, and she did say yes, and their relationship actually changed remarkably little: the transition came as easily as breathing.
He loved Lynn in a thousand different ways. More than anything else, he loved her because of what she did. He never completely found out about her past, but he knew that it was there: he could see that the easy smiles that usually spread over her face weren’t as easy as he had assumed. Every day, she was making herself stay happy, and it was obvious why she was doing it, too – she was doing it for Kennedy. It was this fact that made Cass love her more than anything else, because he knew what that felt like; he’d done it for his mother for years.
In May of 2008, he received a letter from his mother that explained everything and ruined everything in one fell swoop. His mother told him that when he was eight, she had tested HIV+, and that now, the doctors had told her the disease had finally developed into full-blown AIDS. She was scared; she had tried to protect him, but she was scared, and now she wanted him home.
He had no choice. He wasn’t sure if he even wanted one. Within a week he was back in Amsterdam, alone.
He didn’t do too badly there. He didn’t stay at home with the girls; his mother was in hospital, so he stayed at the Magical University of Amsterdam. He made friends there, and he was settling in well, although he missed his friends at Orchid. He knew his mother was going to die, and he accepted that, and most of his efforts went into making her last days as comfortable as possible: it isn’t Cass’s way to rail against fate. He visited her every night, and their relationship was the strongest it had been since he was eight years old. He dreaded her death on his behalf, but welcomed it on hers – he didn’t want her to suffer anymore.
The final blow came two days before the last battle. Gradually it became more and more evident that she was not going to leave the hospital again, and after a while, her organs started to fail. He didn’t leave her side for the last week of her life, although she was rarely conscious.
When she did die, Cass was an utter wreck. He had known it was coming, and he’d partly wanted it to come, but wanting was different from getting. He’d only lost his mother, but, suddenly, he felt like he’d lost everything. All of the resentment that he’d bottled up at having to leave Orchid and his friends came to the surface in his grief, and despite the fact that he had made friends in Amsterdam, he felt alone, because he didn’t feel like anybody needed him to be there. Luckily for him, he only had to wait a couple of days for an excuse to go running back – two days after his mother’s death and one hour after her funeral, he had finally decided that the time had come for him to tell people what had happened, so he tried to phone his friends in Orchid. None answered their mobiles but his friend Jamie Mason, Academic, who informed him of Madeleine’s kidnapping. And he did not wait a moment. He took his guitar, and a change of clothes, and within hours he was back in Britain.
By the time he’d got there, he had composed himself, feeling lucky that he was able to get back to his friends at all and feeling that there’d be no place for his grief in a school which was panicking about the kidnapping of one of its leaders and the injuries and deaths of multitudes of Warriors and Spies. He pushed the grief away again – Cass is good at denial. And on his arrival at Orchid Cass almost immediately got back to doing what he had missed so much in Amsterdam: caring.
Gifts: The first two are air and super-speed, but he is far more gifted with the latter than the former.
His third power is the one that fitted him into his particular group: diagnosis. He cannot heal, but he can ‘see’ inside the human body. He can see the internal organs, and he has an instinctive knowledge of what the inside of the body is supposed to be like. When he finds an illness, he instinctively knows two other things: what is wrong with the part of the body, and what needs to be done to fix it.
However, unfortunately, his power of diagnosis does not come with an instinctive knowledge of the names which have been given to all the organs he knows so well or an instinctive knowledge of the names and jobs of all the different types of medicine. This power is fairly useless if he doesn’t know how to tell people what is wrong or what to do (he can’t cure anything on his own), so he has taken the initiative to read some books on anatomy and medicine and pay particular attention to his biology studies. That being said, though, Cass isn’t very scientific, so it’s an uphill struggle.
Other:
- Just a spot of clarification: in Holland, as everywhere else, the majority of television programmes are American, but as opposed to dubbing them, Dutch subtitles are shown at the bottom of the screen. As a result of this, the majority of Dutch people are able to speak near-perfect English, and Cass is no exception. His accent, however, is not American, because Orchid was the first place where he had to speak English regularly and so the only real intonation that comes through obviously in his voice is the Dutch.
- Over the years, Cass also picked up the piano, the cello and the double bass (although his technique in the latter two is such that it would make any experienced cellist/bassist burst into tears). The guitar is still his favourite, though.
- His friend Jamie Mason has given him the distinction of giving The Best Hugs in the World; an award which most people who have experienced a Cass-hug find they have to agree with.
Pets: None.
Group: Carers.
