Clay Bronson

[Cicadan]

Name: Clay Bronson
Gender: Male
Age: 18
Height: 5'10"
Weight: 175 lb.
Eye Color: Brown
Hair Color: Black
Kills: One or None
Weapon: A stainless steel, necklace size rosary

Appearance: Clay is in places a bit on the pudgy side, with a slightly hefty stomach and large thighs and hips for a male, typically he sticks to looser clothing to disguise this. He has a long neck and strong, sloping shoulders. His face is fairly handsome, he has a well defined chin and jawline, and sharp and expressive brown eyes. He usually wears some carefully tamed stubble over jaw and sides of face, but he keeps his upper lip clear. His hair is kept scruffy and grows over his ears, his most common look is to peel it back from his forehead with gel but otherwise maintain a natural lazy bedhead look. He typically wears casual men’s clothing, tees and jeans, and he has an ear pierced. He has something of an interest in alternative fashion, though he only has a few rarely worn pieces.

On announcement day Clay wears a sports jersey tee, a deep maroon with white stripes on the hems of the sleeve. He wears simple blue denim jeans and black and white checkered Vans. His hair is done up with gel. He has a simple black chain choker, but he keeps it in a pocket.

Interests: Clay has a fairly good singing voice, he is a tenor range with a strong vibrato, and he is also trained in playing the drums. He participates in the school’s marching band as a snare drum player and also has ambitions of starting up a band with some of his peers, though due to a lack of strong leadership things have yet to really get off the ground past broad conceptual ideas. He has started offering some drum lessons in his free time- he has plenty- finding that he enjoys the process of teaching. Clay in general has a flexible taste for music, he mostly listens to jazz but when he started dating Bridie he also picked up some of her taste in more safe and whitewashed pop, he admits it’s at least fun and catchy. He’s also started going to local raves to further expand his tastes and has begun developing a taste for the aesthetic and style, and his mind has been exposed to more extreme anti-authoritarian ideas in the process, which he has started to muse on in his free time.

Clay identifies strongly as a practicing Presbyterian. He’s actually somewhat flaky about attending weekly mass but he’s a dependable volunteer and can regularly be found helping out in Church functions. He has more close friends in the Church than he does in his own school. He participates in the church choir and has also started to learn keyboards, thinking one day he can be the church pianist or organ player. Clay regularly prays and reads the Bible in his free time. Through some of his volunteer sessions working with younger children in Sunday School he’s started thinking of a career in teaching and wants to try babysitting, though he’s still a bit unsure as sometimes he feels nervous about having authority over children.

History: Clay is an only child whose parents came from another state and settled in Colorado because the father is a mid-level manager in a Denver-based tech corporation. Clay was a fairly withdrawn child and needed plenty of parental encouragement to break out of his shell and make friends, and he also attracted a modest but outlook-affecting share of bullies and friends who took advantage of him from time to time because he was submissive and cried easily. He attended some therapy and counseling at such a young age, with an ultimately positive effect, he gained some confidence and moved school districts, and since then Clay has had more esteem, bolstered by a strong spirituality and faith that grew in him from a young age, encouraged by his parents. Some of his best friends were met in the friendly environment of church barbecues and picnics.

Clay as a child played video games and still casually enjoys them. It wasn’t until his tenth birthday that his parents bought him a drum set. It was on a lark, but it turned out Clay massively enjoyed the art of drumming and put a lot of his free time into it. He was part of a amateur band in his middle school years, and some of his peers might still remember ‘Kisstake’, the sort-of-decent band that covered old heartland-style tracks like Dylan, Etheridge, Springsteen, and The Killers. Two of the members moved away to another city when middle school ended and the remainder two got lazy about recruiting. Clay is still friends with all of them. Clay participated in marching band since, but has recently renewed interest in a proper band, on top of his growing tastes in music in general inspiring him with a lot of new ideas he explores in his free time. He tends to have a lot of free time, he’s academically only okay at best, and doesn’t have much in the way of ambitions after graduating high school, except for his musings on becoming a teacher.

Personality: Clay sometimes has difficulty speaking his mind, as good as therapy was for him he’s still socially timid and tends to be pessimistic about his ability, sometimes he feels rather lost in the crowd. In general he comes off as passive, socially he tends to let others have the main say and only occasionally factors in with his own ideas. He’s somewhat observant of his surroundings and tuned in, but he tends to second guess himself and generally deals a lot with doubts and insecurities. He’s friendly when reached out to, though he tends to be awkward when he’s not expecting people to speak to him, which is often. Most of the time he’s the sort to very fastidiously stick to himself when in school, only hanging out with friends at select times. Even in places where he’s more comfortable, say the band room or in church, he still quietly feels awkward and out of place. He’s also suggestible, and picks up new ideas quickly. The one consistent trait is that he’s quite morally driven, and typically affords others an optimism he fails to give to himself and he always tries to be supportive no matter what.

Reputation: Clay does not have much of a reputation: he isn’t a particularly open book and he lacks the popularity or clout for people to pay attention to him. He’s simply one of the many faceless for the most part, the most common exposure to Clay is as ‘the quiet one in class who’s clearly only raising his hand for participation credit’ or ‘that one kid in marching band’. Those who go to his Presbyterian Church know him as a good if still awkward kid who seems to be great with kids and works hard. His few friends tend to be from music classes or have been childhood friends, probably from middle school. His friends know him as relaxed and easy going, reliable and easy to talk into doing fun stuff, though he has pretty clear lines he draws in terms of morals. Bridie's friends also know him fairly well, they get an earful about everything that’s wrong and right with him on the regular.