Julian Murdock

29

Male

Dr. Murdock to his colleagues, Jules to his friends.

One of two main characters (the other being his cousin, Charlie Gibson).

Long and lanky and thin as a rail. Reasonably fit, but not particularly athletic. Slightly underweight, as he's not super great at remembering to eat/attend to his own needs.

• His left hand somewhat resembles a block of charcoal after the accident with his mother. Occasionally, the nerves will seize up and his hand will enter a state of painful paralysis, but other than that, it functions like a normal hand.




• However, he's very self-conscious about the burn and hates it when people stare at or speculate about it; he's gotten into the habit of wearing elbow-length leather work gloves everywhere, at first to cover up the scar, and later as a safety precaution during his scientific experiments.

Lightly tanned

Chestnut brown, strands of it gone prematurely gray.

Respectably short, with lightly trimmed sideburns. Almost always kept very neatly combed.

Sideburns, but nothing else. He prefers to be clean-shaven.

Olive Green

White

156 lbs (slightly underweight)

6'1

• Is the first to blame himself when things go wrong, even when it's not his fault.


• Often forgets to take care of himself, and usually resists help from others out of fear of being a bother.


• Is very reluctant to change, since he values traditions, history, and proven methods highly in his decisions. A situation sometimes needs to reach a breaking point before Julian is persuaded by circumstance, or the strong personality/opinions of a loved one, to alter course.


• Related to that, while he is a firm believer in the inherent worth of a person, there are certain boundaries as to who qualifies as a "person". If the safety and happiness of his loved ones comes at the cost of a supernatural creature's well-being, then that's that. (he later overcomes this and learns to be more accepting of others)
  


• Altruistic and independent to a fault. Julian is all too willing to let things slide, to believe that things will get better soon, to not burden others by accepting their offers of help, that he has a very tough time standing up for himself, especially in interpersonal or emotional situations.


• Julian likes to give people the benefit of the doubt- all the time. "Naive" is such an ugly word, but...

• 
  Very standoffish towards supernatural beings (vampires, werewolves, fae, etc.), but he is eventually able to overcome this prejudice.


• Terrified of magic users, although he is also able to overcome this.

• Genius-level intellect; Julian can absorb knowledge like a sponge.


• Scientific super-genius (he figured out how to frikkin time travel)
  


• Exceptionally quick learner


• Meticulous note-taker

• Julian loves reading sappy, lovey-dovey romance novels; Jane Austen is one of his favorite authors, and he's read Pride and Prejudice fifteen times (it's his go-to book when he's stressed).


• His guilty pleasure is corny slapstick humor; The Three Stooges never fail to make him laugh. When he arrives in the future, Charlie introduces him to the Home Alone movies and he is immediately hooked.


• Taking walks in the woods often helps calm his nerves; he likes the quiet.

(ISFJ-T)

Alignment: Lawful Good

• Rather than offering sporadic, passionate solutions that leave things half finished, Julian is meticulous and careful, taking a steady approach and bending with the needs of the situation just enough to accomplish his end goals. Not only does he ensure that things are done to the highest standard, but he'll often go well beyond what is required. HUGE overachiever.


• A very sensitive and caring person by nature; it's much easier for him to be kind to others than it is to be mean.


• Willing to work hard and learn new skills in order to achieve his goals.


• Is a firm believer in the inherent worth of a person, and is disgusted by senseless acts of violence.


• Until great extremes are met, Julian is incredibly likely to come to his enemies’ aid if the need arises, and is willing to forgive almost anything if that's what needed to make peace.


• Has a strong sense of justice and moral obligation, and is always ready to lend a helping hand.


• Tends to get attached to anyone who shows him a smidge of genuine kindness; yet at the same time, he pushes people away out of fear that he'll get too dependent on them.


• Practical and logically-minded; give him time, and he'll nearly always come up with a feasible solution.


• Perfectionist; Julian's standards for himself are so high that, knowing that he could have done some minor aspect of a task better, he often downplays his successes entirely, instead focusing on how he can improve in the future.


• Despite being a determined altruist, Julian is by no means an optimist- he hopes for the best and plans for the worst, so to speak. Definitely in the realist mindset.

• Experiences extreme anxiety when it comes to himself and his loved ones, being overly-mindful of their wants and needs while often neglecting his own. If he feels like someone is counting on him, he'll move heaven and earth to meet their approval.


• Has what is called an Atlas personality- as a child, he was prematurely obligated to take on a lot of adult responsibilities, developing a pattern of compulsive caregiving as he grew up. Due to this, he has an overblown sense of responsibility; he desperately wants to help others and often blames himself when things go wrong, always wanting to please and accommodate everybody.


• Eventually, Julian's anxiety and sense of hyper-responsibility became so intense that he felt he had no choice but to isolate himself from his friends and peers. He felt responsible for their well-being, and at the same time didn't want to be a "burden", so his solution was to avoid others as much as possible.


• Suffers PTSD from his experiences as his mother's "lab assistant"; he is very protective of his burnt hand, and could be described as being 'paranoid' of people spiking his food.

• Speaks with a slight Jersey accent, using words and phrases that today would be considered old-fashioned.


• He tries his best to be seen as respectable, and takes great care to have good manners and posture.


• When he's thinking hard about something, he'll often mumble to himself, sometimes shouting his epiphanies out loud if he's particularly excited about it.


• Has a habit of writing out his feelings (whether they be positive or negative). He's filled entire bookshelves full of diaries over the years (he is very thorough with his entries).

• His hyper-responsibility is what drove him to invent his time machine; if he could travel forward to the future and bring back a "cure" to the supernatural ailments he saw all around him, he could save his loved ones- he could save the world.

He prefers not to fight at all, actually. (besides, he's rubbish at it)

Inventor and experimental quantum physicist, working with money from a hefty grant given to him by MIT.

Blueberry muffins and peach herbal tea.

Despite being pulled out of school to help support him and his mother as a child (ages 11 to 14), he was easily able to jump back in and graduate the local public schools by the time he was 17.

Was accepted into MIT on a scholarship at age 18 and graduated with a doctorate in quantum mechanics and theoretical physics by age 23.

Born February 1st, 1903 and raised in Newark, New Jersey- his father (Thomas) was a cook, and owned a small cafe bakery in town, and his food was widely regarded as the best in Newark. Julian's mother (Lavinia) handled the finances, and for a while, the family was happy.

Thomas's sister, Elizabeth, also lived in Newark, along with her husband Hiram Gibson and their children Charles and Margaret. Julian and Charles (“Charlie”, who was two years older than him) were practically inseparable growing up.

But when Julian was about eight years old, Thomas died of a stroke, and Julian was left alone with his mother. The shock of her husband's sudden death left her in a deep state of grief and depression, hardly able to get out of bed in the morning, much less care for her young son. But Julian was smart and capable, caring for his mother and providing her with psychological comfort as well as her physical needs.

However, their savings were dwindling fast, and with no other choice, Lavinia had to re-open the cafe. But neither she nor her son could equal Thomas's skill in the kitchen, and the well-known quality of their food began to drop, and instead of serving packed tables, they were lucky to get five or six customers a day. By the time Julian was ten years old, they were on the verge of bankruptcy.

But Lavinia was not about to let her late husband's cafe fall into ruin, and she was willing to take drastic measures to keep that from happening. She began to (illegally) study the occult arts, learning to brew potions and cast spells that would attract people to her food, no matter how distasteful it was. Julian was enlisted to help her perfect her new recipes, tasked with taking notes on different mixtures and their reactions, many of which were highly dangerous. Although Julian never intended to, he more or less absorbed the information from his mother's work, and the intricate knowledge of magic never left him.

It worked; people began frequenting the cafe again, and it seemed like things were going to normal. Sure, Lavinia would often get into one of her moods, leaving Julian to pick up the pieces, but so what? If he didn't do it, nobody would.

Besides, business was going well. He couldn't afford to disrupt the flow of things, no matter how much he hated helping his mother magically drug their customers.

Lavinia began to be more experimental in her menus, becoming unsatisfied with the ill-gotten success they already had. Newer, more volatile magics were incorporated into the food, often with dangerous and stomach-churning side effects. But Julian stayed loyal to his mother; she wouldn't be doing this if it wasn't in their best interest. She was doing this out of love... right?

Fortunately, Julian had his cousin Charlie looking out for him– without his cousin's support and friendship, Julian would have surely snapped under the pressure. But Julian kept the secret; if he ratted her out, there was no telling what she'd do to him... and besides, she was his mother. Even when she pulled him out of school to work full-time at the cafe, even when she had him taste-test the magically spiked food to see how it reacted to the human body, even when she went into one of her rages or slumps of depression, Julian remained by her side, willing to take the blame and clean up the mess if necessary. He wanted to be a good son, even if that came at the cost of his own happiness.

This cycle of blame, guilt, and emotional turmoil continued on for years, until one instance when Julian was fourteen and over at Charlie's house; sleep-deprived, he let it slip that his mother was formulating a new serum to cook into next week's house special.

That was all it took for Charlie to realize that something very, very wrong was going on at Julian's house. He had suspected that something was up for a while, but he had assumed that Julian was just working too hard. Despite Julian's pleading, the next day Charlie told his father what Julian had told him.

Hiram notified the authorities, and that night, the sheriff and his posse forced their way into the Murdock house, catching Julian and Lavinia in the middle of brewing a potion for the next morning's bread. Lavinia acted quickly, filling a vial with the half-finished, very volatile concoction and threatening to make her son drink it if the posse so much as looked at her funny; they didn't listen. One of the men shot at the vial, shattering its contents over Julian's left hand. Lavinia was apprehended, but Julian's hand had been burnt black- to this day, he carries that scar.

After the arrest of his mother and the foreclosure of the cafe, Julian was cleared of all the charges Lavinia had been found guilty of and taken in by the Gibsons, who more or less adopted him as a second son. He re-enrolled back in school, zipping through the grades at an unprecedented rate, determined not to let this new lease on life pass him by. More than anything, he did not want to be a burden on them or to intrude on their kindness.

Around the time that he was sixteen, the fear of infection by “monsters” (namely vampires and werewolves, among other types) had spread to his town, although he had never seen a monster himself. Being young and naive (or perhaps just hopeful), he didn’t take the threat very seriously, preferring to focus on his studies- until a year later, when Charlie eloped with his vampire girlfriend and came back seven months later as a vampire himself. There was a huge fight between Charlie and Mr. & Mrs. Gibson, ending in Charlie getting kicked out for good.

Julian was heartbroken, torn between his loyalty to Charlie and his revulsion towards the supernatural. He couldn't understand how this could happen; how his lifelong best friend could wind up as a depraved, bloodsucking creature of the night. He wondered if there was anything he could've done to prevent this, or if there was anything he could still do to help make things right.

From that day, Julian devoted himself to finding a cure for/alternate way to dispose of the growing population of vampires, werewolves, witches, and every other monster that plagued his nightmares. After working tirelessly for years with minimal results, Julian concluded that it was highly unlikely that his generation was going to find a solution… but what about future generations? Wouldn’t it be more efficient to travel forward in time and bring back the necessary knowledge?

After graduating from MIT in 1926, Julian applied for a grant from the school and officially began work on a time machine. Things are steady for a while, but eventually, he hit a slump, and his progress quickly began to dwindle. In December of 1929, MIT informed him that, if he didn't show them some real progress fast, they were going to revoke his grant.

Julian was desperate and running out of ideas. He felt trapped, but... there was one more option he could cash in.

In January of 1930, he took a trip to the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women to visit his mother. After some light interrogation (Julian somehow manages to keep his emotions in check), Lavinia revealed where she got ahold of the majority of her magic books and ingredients: "The Thistleweed Fair", a traveling black market that peddled (illegal) crypto-botanical supplies, neo-thaumaturgy and alchemy resources.

Julian tracked down the fair in the following March, where he picked up several items, including a recently-published article on Chronokinetic theory and a rare handbook for home-brewed "self help" potions. Among the list of recipes was a tonic that claimed to "broaden one's mental horizons" and allow the drinker to see the details and possibilities they had missed. Julian was suspicious of this, but the fact remained that this was pretty much his only hope.

The recipe was true to its promise- Julian was able to see everything. Foreign equations and observations flooded his mind and he was able to comprehend new research at speeds he had only ever dreamed of reaching. However, the tonic's effects only lasted a few hours, and Julian found himself brewing the concoction again and again, finding new answers with every drink. However, this didn't come without side effects; the tonic sapped him of his stamina, and often he'd fall asleep at the drop of a hat. Other times, he'd find himself plagued with nightmarish hallucinations, unsure if what he was seeing was real. But to him, the positives outweighed the negatives, and he continued to use the tonic whenever he hit a block in his research.

By August of 1932, it was finished. He traveled 100 years into the future, arriving in 2032’s Newark… and almost immediately getting his machine towed and impounded because tow-away zones weren’t a thing back in his time. Whoops.

Julian quickly realized the reality of his situation: monsters and humans were living amongst each other, somehow able to ignore the fact that monsters could turn them all into vicious, undead beasts on a whim. This freaked him out, especially the part where he learned that no one in one hundred years had been able to find a cure for anything, and that (worst of all) magic was not only legal, but widely used by the general public in everyday activities. He was desperate to get home, but was stranded in a future he considered to be unfathomably horrifying, all alone- but was he, really?

After all, he does have an immortal vampire for a cousin...

February 1st, 1903

• A gray tabby cat named Lucille. He loves her very much.