B055 - Ogilvie, Nick [DECEASED]

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DECEASED

Name: Nicholas "Nick" Domhnall Parkhurst Ogilvie
Gender: Male
Age: Eighteen (18)
Grade: Senior
School: George Hunter High School
Hobbies and Interests: Illusions, reality TV, history (especially Celtic), Scrabble

Appearance: Nick is often mistaken for being a few years older than he really is, a misconception Nick encourages. He has a rather large build, standing at 6'3" and at 208lb. He has a brawny and thickset frame, with a healthy amount of fat for his size and evenly distributed muscle. Nick tends to have his rather muscular forearms on display constantly, both to show off his build and his considerable body hair. As a result of his Celtic heritage, he has rather pale skin, green eyes, and a strong Edinburgh accent.

Nick is often described as handsome, with his prominent and well-groomed eyebrows being his favourite feature. He also has chiselled, well-defined features, but his jawline is concealed beneath a rather thick beard. Nick has dark black hair, which seems to be only darker on his face. Nick has been capable of growing a substantial and bushy beard for a couple of years now, and he takes a strange pride in letting it grow out with minimal interference. While he keeps it clean, it is often untrimmed and unkempt, with stray strands of hair left untamed and knots left alone. He only admits to vanity towards two features: his eyebrows and his beard.

Nick prefers to wear dark clothing, favouring browns, blacks, and navy blues. He has a particular fondness for waistcoats. He is often seen during leisure hours with a lit cigar, but more to look cool than any actual desire to smoke. On the day of the abduction, Nick was wearing a white dress shirt, a stainless steel watch, a navy blue waistcoast, navy suit trousers, and black quarter brogue Oxford dress shoes. In contrast to his smart attire, his hair and beard looked more unkempt than usual.

Biography: Nick Ogilvie was born in Edinburgh on October 18, 1999. His parents are both accomplished academics, who married in 1994 after meeting at the University of Edinburgh. His mother, Christine, is a professor in international relations and a regular fixture in think tanks, journal editorial boards, and lecture circuits. His father, Alistair, is a retired accountant turned professor of business finance with a successful career teaching and researching at business schools. Nick is the second of three children. He has an older sister, Joanne, born 1997, and a younger brother, Willie, born 2000.

Both being cosmopolitan and liberal-minded, Christine and Alistair tried giving all of their children as progressive an upbringing as they could manage. All three Ogilvie children were given music and language lessons from a young age, raised on as healthy and scientifically up-to-date a diet as their parents could find, and were given diverse cultural experiences throughout their childhood. To an extent, this parenting style sometimes veered into the unimaginative. In working out how much time their children should spend without supervision or watching profane television, for example, they consulted academic research rather too much, instead of using their own judgement.

Nick owes much to this upbringing: he is open-minded, tolerant, inquisitive, and aware of the world around him, and is all things considered a healthy young man. Nick has a deep affection for various fields of study, from philosophy to physics, and a rational disposition, all things his parents tried to cultivate. The Ogilvies enjoy a largely peaceful home life, with plenty of in-jokes and friendly teasing, mostly spawned by Christine's dark and worldly sense of humour and her tendency to act consistently with her Bohemian worldview.

There are still tensions within the family, however. Thanks to the aversion to conflict and talents for brushing things under the carpet, they rarely come out in big arguments. The relationship between Nick and Alistair is strained, however, because the two men rarely communicate and, when they do, they tend to talk over and misunderstand one another. In Nick's mind, Alistair has a tendency, despite claiming to do otherwise, towards being close-minded and materialistic in his views, thinking that non-business fields of study are intrinsically of less value. Nick's father considers this a caricature, and his advice towards his children, to focus on earning potential of future vocations, to merely be common sense.

Being the middle child, he received somewhat less personalised care than his other two siblings, and so found much of his upbringing suffocating. They still attempted to be involved whenever they could, but because of a failure to properly customise their care appropriately, it was less supportive and more just, to Nick's mind, another hurdle that had to be navigated. Whereas Joanne is now a self-styled world traveller, currently spending a year abroad volunteering, and Willie has become a nature lover, Nick's more esoteric and less seemly hobbies did not receive the same level of encouragement. His parents never discouraged any hobbies he developed, but struggled to understand them. Often, when he mentioned a new interest, they would buy him a gift hoping to support it, but would often misunderstand it. When he was ten, for example, he briefly was a fan of professional wrestling. His parents bought him boxing lessons. When he mentioned being a fan of DC at age twelve, his parents assumed he meant US politics rather than the comics company, and embarrassingly themed his birthday party accordingly.

Nick always felt he had the worst deal out of his siblings. He gets on well with both of them, but he disliked being placed under his sister's frequent guardianship as a babysitter, finding the minimal age difference between the two not justifying the degree of authority she was given. He similarly detested being given the same duty of care over his younger brother, again not thinking the extra year warranted him being entrusted such responsibilities, and being frustrated that Joanne was relieved of such tasks because her exams were always of a higher level than his.

Nick did not harbour any serious resentments towards his parents, and admired their overall attitude too much to develop a full-on rebellious streak. He did, however, end up valuing the approval of friends at school far more, unable to view his siblings as peers. At the age of ten, he ended up befriending the popular kid in his class, Ryan McInnis. The friendship with Ryan and his crew gave Nick many benefits. He had a constant audience for his jokes and performances, friends that kept him updated on the inappropriate shows and games his parents did not deem it suitable for Nick to watch, and soon gave Nick an insight into many irreverent class in-jokes.

It was at this age that Nick first developed his strongest passion: illusions. Again, his parents did not understand this hobby, mistaking it at first for a predilection towards fantasy literature, and then briefly afterwards for an interest in witchcraft and Satanism. These early misunderstandings made Nick very insistent on clarifying that what interested him was illusions, not magic. Claiming that magic existed is, to Nick, deceptive and dishonest. For Nick, performing tricks is a way to sate his ego and impress his peers, and he also finds that the act of putting together and rehearsing a trick engenders a feeling of accomplishment he otherwise struggles to obtain. Nick is especially fond of close-up magic with a comedic twist, with tricks based around performing for a small audience or a single friend and based on an in-joke or shared reference and cups, coins and cards being common tools he uses. He has an ambition to, ultimately, scale up this talent one day and perform for larger crowds, but has so far lacked the discipline or creativity to actually put together a show that can be shown to anything more than a few classmates at a lunch table. He has no particular individuals he looks up to, preferring more to watch a wide variety of tricks on both TV and online and reading a fair amount of history on the subject.

The friendship with Ryan came to a sharp end in 2013. Nick realised that many of the in-jokes and games he had been buying into amounted to bullying, when a student transferred to a new school due to a series of crude nicknames Nick had played a role in spreading. This caused Nick to re-evaluate his whole relationship with Ryan. With little warning and no explanation, Nick severed the friendship. Ryan tried approaching him outside of school, knocking on Nick's door. Nick panicked, and punched Ryan in the face. Ryan laughed it off, interpreting it as an attempt at slapstick that had misfired, a misconception Nick was too cowardly to correct, and didn't take the hint. Soon after that, Nick's school life declined precipitously. Ryan had not told others about their confrontation, but Nick's mood soured regardless. As a result of this sour turn in mood, Nick found himself increasingly an outcast at school, viewed as irritable and prone to mood swings.

Christine and Alistair had both been sitting on job offers in the States, and with Nick wanting a fresh start, Willie continuing with secondary education, and Joanne consenting to the move, they decided to take those offers. In 2013, Alistair took a job at the business program of the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga, and Christine at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University in North Carolina. After searching around for suitable local amenities and weighing up nearby travel opportunities, they settled on Chattanooga as the place to raise their family. During term time, Christine would temporarily reside in Durham as appropriate.

Though he is confident he is no longer a bully, susceptibility to peer pressure, borne out of a desire to fit in, is a recurring theme in Nick's life. He is aware of this, which means he is capable of both a surprising degree of self-reflection on the matter and an unhealthy habit to blame it for his problems. Peer pressure, in Nick's mind, is the reason he smokes and the explanation for the times later in his teenage years when he's been insensitive or callous.

In truth, Nick does not need much encouragement to make a mistake. He has an off-colour sense of humour, and can sometimes fall back into his old habits of pushing a joke at someone else's expense too far. If it is receiving a positive reaction from others, he can be, in the moment, oblivious to any harm he's causing. What is different, though, is that now he does not join in jokes that he can see from the outset that are cruel, and does not knowingly make jokes that press at known sensitivities of others. As a child, Nick would, for example, laugh at the weight or social class of his peers. Now, he does not do so, but if someone commits a social faux pas or has a lapse in common sense, that is when he can be rather cruel with his humour. If pointed out to him, privately, that a joke he had made was unfair or aggressive, he will apologise later.

If made aware of any failing in his conduct in the moment, however, he responds far less amiably. His natural defence mechanism when feeling attacked, or when aware he's done something wrong but too stubborn to give an apology, is to be standoffish and sarcastic. When those mechanisms fail or he's pushed, Nick can throw a temper tantrum. Usually that involves him storming off and slamming doors, though a couple of times, in the heat of the moment he has thrown drinks or tried to use his size to intimidate someone. Despite having the best of intentions, Nick's foibles mean some people in Chattanooga took a quick disliking to him.

By and large, though, he's a well-liked member of the class. He's gregarious, quick with a joke, and, provided his insecurities are not triggered, can generally laugh at his own expense. Nick is also known as being rather promiscuous. Openly bisexual since fifteen, Nick enjoys partying hard and sleeping around, but is faithful within relationships. Nick takes pride in his appearance, particularly his beard and eyebrows, and exercises regularly, mostly in the form of attending gym. A polyamorous relationship with Beryl Mahelona and Tristan O'Hara had recently fallen apart due to a caustic outburst Nick unleashed at Tristan. While Beryl was not directly involved in the drama, the relationship between Nick and Beryl soon crumbled away too. This whole saga has left Nick feeling rather spiteful and angry.

Nick is a natural performer, and though he does not demand to be the centre of attention, he certainly enjoys it. As he's grown older, he has become far bolder with his illusions, often using them as the basis for practical jokes or to send people good wishes and happy birthdays. He has founded an "Illusionist's Circle" at George Hunter High, secretly aspiring to turn this hobby into a vocation. Fearing pushback from parents and teachers, he tells this only to close friends. After graduation, he hopes to take a gap year, hoping to attend some illusionist events and conferences around the country. He insists to his parents, who prioritise academic success above all else, that he intends to go to university after, but he is privately unsure.

To relax, Nick has two main past-times: reality TV and Scrabble. He enjoys watching reality TV, and though he tends to keep his various fandoms fairly muted while in school, he is active in online internet communities about series such as Big Brother, Survivor, and RuPaul's Drag Race. Nick enjoys being able to follow drama and competition without himself having a direct stake in the matter, and finds watching reality TV a chance to unwind and focus on someone else's problems other than his own.

Nick is a keen player of Scrabble, it being a rare shared interest among the Ogilvie family. The family rarely played board games before moving to Chattanooga, and upon arriving in Tennessee, Alistair insisted on trying out the many unused board games in the collection they had accumulated over the years. Nick never took to the rest of the board games, but he found something relaxing about Scrabble and something that gave him a sense of accomplishment that, short of illusions, he otherwise could not obtain. He sometimes plays Scrabble with others. For example, a game of Scrabble was what sparked his initial relationship with Beryl.

At school, Nick performs decently. His strongest subjects are the humanities and mathematics, reflecting the interests of his parents. His favourite subject is history, albeit he does not often enjoy the exact historical subjects studied at school. Nick tends to view the state's curriculums with scepticism, and to be interested in more global or international subjects than what the classroom offers. Nick prefers more esoteric tales of ordinary individuals or complicated behind the scenes political wrangling to the topics usually covered at school. His particular favourite, an interest sparked by a sense of patriotism towards his homeland, is Celtic history. At first this was an interest in Scottish history, but as he read books and watched documentaries, he also developed fascinations in Welsh, Cornish, Breton, and Irish history.

Advantages: Nick is healthy, well-built, and decently popular. As an illusionist, Nick's skills at deception, distraction, and creativity might be transferable to an island context.
Disadvantages: Nick is vulnerable to peer pressure, and can be cajoled or manipulated into making bad decisions. He is also prone to temper tantrums and can sometimes have a standoffish or abrasive demeanour.

Designated Number: Male Student No. 55

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Designated Weapon: Jagdkommando Tri-Dagger

Conclusion: Hey, my favorite stupid knife. I don't see B055 becoming my favorite stupid boy, but I'm open to surprises. For your next trick, try being halfway competent, and maybe I'll get over the fact that magic tricks are for kids and dumbasses. - Veronica Rai

DECEASED