Greece :: Herakles Karpusi :: WIP

[greece]

You want to tell me what this is all about?

Name: Herakles Karpusi

Street Name: N/A.

As I walk through the valley of the shadow of death
I take a look at my life and realize there's not much left

Age: Twenty-eight-years-old

Bitch or Homie: Male

Cause I've been blastin' and laughin so long that

Even my ma'ma thinks that my mind is gone[/font][/size][/b]

Where you from?: Heraklion, Greece

Whatchoo do?: Homeless Wanderer

Who you be reppin?: N/A

But I ain't never crossed a man that didn't deserve it
Me, be treated like a punk, you know that's unheard of

How you do: (Personality)

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You better watch how you talkin, and where you walkin

Or you and your homies might be lined in chalk

Your thing: (likes)

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I really hate to trip, but I gotta loc'-

As they grew I see myself in the pistol smoke, fool

Not your thing: (dislikes)

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I'm the kinda G the little homies wanna be like

What you been through:

• Herakles Karpusi was born just as the sun reached its highest point in the day on March 25, 1983.
  
  
• His mother, Hera, was a woman of fortunate means who worked as a historian specializing in Hellenistic Greek History. Prior to her pregnancy she worked at the National Archeological Museum in Athens. However, halfway through her pregnancy she began to experience complications that caused her to resign from her job and move to Heraklion in order to rest.
  
  
• As for his father, well, Herakles would never get to know the man. From what little his mother would tell him growing up, he was an arrogant, proud man whose personality clashed with her own. Their relationship lasted only briefly before they parted ways to see other people, and the man never tried to contact Hera since (and thus never knew about his son).
  
  
• Shortly after Herakles was born and once she received a clean bill of health from her doctor, Hera set out to find work again. She applied to some of the top museums across the world before finally settling one in the United States. It was not her ideal choice—America seemed so crowded and impersonal—but it gave her more time to spend with her son.
  
  
• Growing up, Herakles would find himself surrounded by great minds of the modern world. His mother had a fondness for attending academic lectures at the local universities and Herakles, being a quiet baby, would come along with her. He took many naps to the sound of political theories, historical overviews, and scientific discoveries, though at such a young age he couldn’t even begin to understand them.
  
  
• It was here that Herakles developed his first interests in intellectual pursuits. His mother encouraged him from the moment he started speaking to always ask questions and to always possess the courage to face the unknown in the pursuit of knowledge. “The world has a wealth of information just waiting to be discovered,” she told him, “but you must be willing to seek it out.”
  
  
• Before he began elementary school, Herakles spent his early childhood pursuing topics that interested him. If he had questions about how the stray cats they fed on their back porch purred, his mother would take him to the library and point him in the direction of the books he would need. He learned to read at a very early age and developed a thirst for reading.
  
  
• Reading facilitated another passion Herakles possessed: languages and their conventions. Raised on both Greek and English by a mother with an interest in ancient predecessors to the modern tongues, Herakles came to love the sound of foreign words. However, as a child this interest would come and go as other fascinations took place in the forefront of his mind.
  
  
• Soon enough it came time for Herakles to start elementary school, and it was here he first experienced one of life’s sorrows: struggle. Life had been easy for him under his mother’s guidance, but her indulgence of his whims left him unprepared to handle the structure of modern schooling.
  
  
• For the first few weeks, Herakles was deeply unhappy at his school. The lectures he had once fallen asleep to in his mother’s lap with her heartbeat pressed to his ear no longer offered him comfort. When he first fell asleep to them, his teacher woke him up with a firm scolding and a yellow card in warning.
  
  
• Learning, too, brought him little joy because now he had to focus on topics that did not strike his interest that day. In many ways, Herakles felt himself better than the lessons he was forced to sit through. He knew how to count and he knew his alphabet, so why couldn’t he read about the insects he discovered on his way to school today instead?
  
  
• Struggle also came to him in the form of social interaction. Herakles had spent his early childhood surrounded by adults and had patterned his social interactions after them. However, the small eccentricities the adults found ‘cute,’ ‘charming,’ or ‘clever’ his peers only found ‘weird’ and ‘strange.’
  
  
• Very quickly Herakles came to hate school and devised ways to never have to go back to it. When his mother woke him up in the morning, he would throw a fit. If he caused enough trouble, she would grow so frustrated with him that she would give up her efforts and let him stay at her side as she worked that day.
  
  
• Yet Hera caught on to her son’s trick and found a way around it. She would dress him as he was sleeping, carry him out to the car without disturbing him, and drive him to school. By the time Herakles woke up, it would be too late for him to throw a fit and he would have no other choice but to stay.
  
  
• Frustrated his mother found a way to force him to attend class, Herakles sought other ways to get sent home. He became surly and disrespectful during class time, back talking to the teacher and being uncooperative. During recess, he played off by himself and sent the other children away with grumpy words when they came to talk to him.
  
  
• Herakles was sent home for his unruly behavior over a dozen times as the year went on, much to his delight. However, toward the end of the school year his mother finally broke down in tears. She couldn’t keep stressing over whether he would have a good day or a bad day, nor could she keep missing work to pick him up. Even more, Hera couldn’t bear being unable to fix her son’s unhappiness.
  
  
• For the first time, Herakles felt contrite for his behavior. This was the first time he had ever seen his mother cry, and it shamed him to know he had been the cause of her tears. He hated school, yes, but he hated upsetting his mother even more. Crying himself, he buried his face in her lap and apologized for all of the trouble he’d given her.
  
  
• The next day, Herakles tried to turn over a new leaf. He set his kitty alarm clock to wake him up before his mother would and got ready on his own. At school, he sat quietly and even answered his teacher’s questions when she asked him. He still kept to himself at recess, but now there was less bickering between himself and his classmates.
  
  
• Herakles finished his first year of school on a positive note and, as he grew older, discovered school wasn’t nearly as bad as his younger self had thought. It took a while, but he eventually made friends with a few of the other children. The material he was forced to study became more challenging and, thus, more interesting.
  
  
• Life continued on for Herakles without much incident. He graduated on to middle school, where he discovered a small group of kids not unlike himself to spend time with. These kids, all quiet and studious just as he was, became his best friends and he cherished their companionship a great deal.
  
  
• A little after a year into his middle schooling, Herakles discovered one of life’s greatest mysteries: puberty. All of a sudden his voice started to crack, hair grew in strange places on his body, his height shot up what felt like overnight, and he developed an increasing interest in the people around him.
  
  
• Perhaps it is fortunate that Hera encouraged her son to explore the world from such an early age because rather than fearing the changes happening to his body, Herakles educated himself on them. This education was facilitated by Hera who, upon noticing the changes to her son, made sure to assure him she was open for questions if he had them.
  
  
• Yet even with Hera’s support puberty came with its costs, and Herakles found himself trapped in a body stuck between that of a boy and that of a man. He was, needless to say, very awkward and stricken with clumsiness as he tried to adapt to the physical differences. For the longest time, he felt uncomfortable in his own body and very self-conscious about it.
  
  
• The change in temperament also posed its problems. Though Herakles had shown bouts of temper in his childhood, the hormones in his body caused his mood to sour. He became combative and quick to challenge his peers, a dangerous combination in middle school. Over the next two years, he got into several scuffles and fist fights with other boys.
  
  
• One boy in particular was a particular nuisance to Herakles. Hailing from Turkey, he was everything Herakles hated in a person. He was a smug braggart with an inflated sense of self-worth and self-importance who saw himself as being better than Herakles. To add insult to injury, this Turkish boy kept trying to steal one of his friends away.
  
  
• Needless to say, the two did not get along. Their mutual friend tried to make them interact peacefully, but they spent much of their time bickering and fighting over who this friend liked more. The Turkish boy was responsible for many of the bruises, scrapes, and bloody noses Herakles went home with. When middle school ended, the two parted on bad terms.
  
  
• Before the end of middle school, Herakles had never shown much of an interest in sports. He had been a scholarly boy, studious and interested in a wide variety of subjects. However, in the summer before his first year of high school his mother suggested sports as a way to give him more confidence in his body.
  
  
• After examining his options, Herakles eventually settled on soccer. He realized, though, that he had a long way to go if he was ever going to be good at the sport. Out of shape, weak and scrappy, he needed to really devote himself to training to match the pace his older teammates set. Running and weight lifting, he decided, would help him do that.
  
  
• The start of high school found Herakles in better shape than he’d been in all his life, even though he still had a long way to go in order to get where he wanted to be. He kept up his training over his freshman year to the encouragement of his friends and the mockery of his Turkish rival, who said no matter how strong Herakles became he would be stronger.
  
  
• Herakles became determined to prove him wrong, and thus gained another incentive to growing stronger aside from increasing his self-confidence. The bigger he got, the stronger he got, the easier it would be to show that Turkish bastard just who was better between the two of them—and Herakles would be better.
  
  
• Aside from honing his body, Herakles also focused on keeping his mind sharp. One of his strengths had always been his intelligence, and from the very beginning he’d realized he could hold that much over his Turkish rival. Though he still lost the physical fights (and there were numerous fights), he often won the intellectual ones.
  
  
• In his sophomore year, Herakles and his Turkish rival found a new forum for their competition: wrestling. Both joined the school’s wrestling team, determined to one up the other, and quickly rose to the top two in their weight class. They pushed each other to keep training, keep perfecting their skill, and keep fighting even when it seemed like they were down for the count.
  
  
• Perhaps it was in this mutual desire to beat each other that forged a tentative not-quite-friendship between the two. Though they strove to show the other up, the two began to train at the same time in the same room (but never together). Their verbal insults toward each other would contain legitimate criticisms that helped the other improve.
  
  
• Halfway through his sophomore year, Herakles looked like a completely different person. No longer was he the scrawny, scrappy, awkward mess of limbs he had been through middle school. Instead he had filled out and gained a considerable amount of muscle for his age thanks to all of his working out, and a strange sort of grace from his wrestling.
  
  
• This had an unintended side-effect: female magnetism. Herakles had always been fortunate in the looks department, taking after his mother with his dark hair, green eyes, and overall handsome features. Now, though, he had a body to match his face, and in a setting where hormones ran rampant he became a hit with the girls.
  
  
• By the end of his junior year, Herakles developed a reputation as a playboy. He treated the people he dated like he treated the subjects he studied; as soon as he grew bored, he moved onto someone more interesting. His quest was one for constant intellectual stimulation, a puzzle he couldn’t solve, but high school kids gave up their secrets too easily.
  
  
• Herakles also developed a reputation of being easy. He had no real discriminating taste in the people he dated. As long as his partner was interested and interesting, he saw no problem in going out for dinner with them or spending an evening together. The same applied to the more physical aspects of his relationships. If he enjoyed something, why should he deny himself it?
  
  
• His Turkish rival mocked him endlessly for this, yet in the end it was Herakles who got the final laugh. After all, through every single one of their high school years, the two often came to draws in their wrestling matches. However, on the very last day of their senior year, the two of them shared their last fight on mats in the gymnasium. Herakles won.
  
  
• The two of them parted as equals with a grudging respect for each other that day, and though Herakles would never admit it out loud he came to miss his Turkish rival. It seemed strange but having that goal of one day beating the other boy had given him a sense of direction and purpose in his life, one that faded as his victory sank in and the summer wore on.
  
  
• In the fall of that year, Herakles began school at a big name university as a philosophy major. However, he would later change that to history, then to political science, before settling back on history. His inability to focus and dedicate himself to one thing caused him to take five years at college before he graduated onto graduate school.
  
  
• Herakles attended graduate school close to home so that he could see his mother and the few friends he kept from high school more frequently. He considered going into a doctorate program like his mother had, but eventually settled for a Master’s degree instead. It took him three years of hard work and cramped schedules to finish his program.
  
  
• Yet graduate school left Herakles with a growing sense of unhappiness. The intense studying he’d been forced to do over the past few years didn’t particularly bother him, given his natural inclination toward intellectual pursuits, but it made him realize how much he hated being boxed in for his day. Rigid schedules just weren’t for him.
  
  
• Two weeks after gaining his Master’s degree, Herakles was set to have a job interview. However, his realization post-graduate school had lead him to thinking and thinking had lead him to a discovery: the idea of going day in and day out to the same job every day, caught in the same routine, terrified him.
  
  
• He just couldn’t do it. Herakles stared at the suit he was supposed to put on, held the tie in his hands, and found himself daunted at the prospect of working. What if he hated his job? What if he grew bored with it but couldn’t leave? What if history wasn’t the field he was destined for? What if, what if, what if—so many doubts clouded his mind.
  
  
• Herakles never made it to his job interview. Instead, he slipped on a pair of jeans, a thin white t-shirt, and some sneakers, tucked a little bit of cash into his wallet, and walked out his door. He had no destination in mind as he kept walking, instead just going wherever his feet led him, and he didn’t stop walking until the stars lit up the night sky.
  
  
• Knowing his mother would be worried when she discovered his absence, Herakles found a payphone and gave her a call. The two spoke for close to an hour, and though she tried to persuade him to come home he refused. “I need to find myself,” he told her simply, and although she didn’t understand Hera did her best to support him.
  
  
• Before they hung up, Hera made him promise to call her should he ever need anything and to check in periodically so she would know he wasn’t dead in an alley somewhere. Thus, with her support, Herakles went on a cross-country walk, stopping where he pleased and frequently visiting the same cities his mother had gone to guest lecture.
  
  
• Those first few weeks living with only his resourcefulness to take care of him were rough on Herakles. He was used to buying everything he needed and vegetating in his house when he wasn’t out with friends or at school. Now, though, he was constantly on the move and the money he brought with him didn’t last very long.
  
  
• However, to his credit, Herakles adapted. He slept on park benches when he needed to, though that was no great sacrifice, and learned quickly where the best sources of free food were. Most big chain markets would throw out their older stock and with enough rummaging in the trash bins outside Herakles could pull together a few decent meals.
  
  
• When he needed to shower, Herakles would find either a natural source of water or sneak into someone’s back yard to use their swimming pool. The same applied when he needed something to drink; there was always an available source free to him wherever he went. All he had to do was figure out how to search for it.
  
  
• Eventually, however, Herakles realized he would need more than the clothes on his back to survive. Winter would come soon enough, which meant he would need more than his cotton shirt to keep him warm. His shoes were also getting worn from all of his walking, and though he tried to wash fairly regularly he needed soap. He just didn’t have the money for such luxuries.
  
  
• The solution to his problems came to him unexpectedly. As Herakles walked the streets of a city late at night, a young woman only a few years younger than himself approached him. She introduced herself as Anne and boldly asked him if he wanted to go back to her place. Then, after a glance back to her giggling group of friends, she added in a whisper, “Please, I’ll even pay you.”
  
  
• Herakles accepted this offer and followed Anne back to her apartment. Along the way, she nervously explained that tonight was her twenty-second birthday and her friends, in their celebrations, had teased her about her shyness. They had meant it in good jest, she insisted, but their claims that she would never be the adventurous sort who asked a guy out had stung nonetheless.
  
  
• To Herakles, why he’d been asked to her apartment was a non-issue. He enjoyed sex and she even offered to pay him, so what reason was there not to go? Besides, she seemed like a nice enough girl even if her choice in friends was questionable. It was no great sacrifice to him to sleep with her.
  
  
• The entire affair lasted about an hour and, once finished, Herakles walked away with a crisp hundred dollar bill in his pocket. He also walked away a great deal cleaner than he’d been in a while, having asked if he could use her shower beforehand. All in all, not a bad night and now he could buy some of the supplies he needed.
  
  
• Herakles bought his soaps and his new shoes, and a backpack to tuck it all in. He even sprang for some new clothes, though doing so ate up the last of his money. However, that was no longer a concern for him because he had found a way to gain the things he needed whenever he needed them: sex.
  
  
• In this way, Herakles developed a way to survive. If he needed a place to stay for the night due to the weather conditions, he would pick someone up at a bar and stay the night. Sometimes, when he ran out of soap or found himself longing for a warm shower, he would borrow their bathroom before they slept together or before he left.
  
  
• There was also the issue of food and money. His lovers didn’t seem to mind if he nibbled on a few things from the kitchen, which helped when he couldn’t find food from the stores or wanted a little more variety. Some of them mistook him for a prostitute (though Herakles could not imagine why; jeans and a t-shirt didn’t seem very alluring wear) and paid him for the sex.
  
  
• Thus life continued on for Herakles in such a matter for a little over two years. Over the course of those years, he picked up a few stray cats that found him more interesting to follow than the mice in the city alleys. Some he found as kittens and they grew up with him under his care. Others were older strays, cast out by their owners and trying to survive on the skills they had.
  
  
• Those cats became his closest companions. He curled up with them on park benches, shared his meals with them, and kept them warm when the weather took a nasty turn. Keeping them with him made it harder to find companions for the night (most did not appreciate strange cats in their house), but he found if he snuck them in and kept them quiet all worked out.
  
  
• Now, in late 2011, life finds Herakles and his cats in the city of Polaris just as a deep chill settles over the city. Though he wears warmer clothing and carries blankets with him for his cats, he fears he might be ill-prepared for the winter and is trying to gather supplies before he makes a quick trek to somewhere warmer.

On my knees in the night

Other shit:

Sayin prayers in the street light

Show us what you got: (RP sample)

300 words minimum

Been spending most our lives living in the Gangsta's Paradise