player information!

NAME: Elle
CONTACT: AIM @ the dove pursues.
FAVORITE BOOK: The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery.


character information!

CHARACTER'S NAME: Jack Spratt.
CHARACTER'S BOOK(VERSE): The Nursery Crime Division series by Jasper Fforde.
POINT IN CANON: After the events of The Fourth Bear.
AFFILIATION: Civilian, in cahoots with the Canon Cops.

CHARACTER'S JOURNAL: dcispratt
DESIRED PB: Jack Davenport.

CHARACTER'S APPEARANCE: Jack Spratt is so unremarkable looking that it's amazing how ordinary he is. He's in his early forties and has dark brown, greying hair that currently shows no signs of receding and it positively floppy. He has hazel eyes, dark, expressive eyebrows and light skin because, as an Englishman, he rarely gets a great deal of sun and probably wouldn't go out of his way to get a tan even if the right light was available. Jack's quite tall, standing at six-foot-one, and he's of medium and average weight - not skin and bone and not roly-poly, either. Of course, he's no underwear model and doesn't exactly rely on brute force in his job - he's a thinker, not a fighter.

CHARACTER'S PERSONALITY: Jack Spratt is normal. Well, as normal as one can get when they're a PDR - a Person of Dubious Reality. That's right, Jack's a Nursery Rhyme character. You know - Jack Sprat could eat no fat, and his wife could eat no lean. Then again, compared to other detectives Jack has to deal with, he's utterly peculiar in his normality. Happily married and a father, Jack is also totally honest and refuses to cater to the media's demand for glamorous hero detectives. Where the members of the Guild of Detectives fill their cases with lavish, outrageous details and fabricate almost all of the information for the Amazing Crime Stories magazine, Jack just wants to catch the bad guy - without worrying about audience reaction.

Jack is, nonetheless, an experienced and accomplished detective - but he lacks a great deal of self-confidence in his abilities, and this shows obviously whenever he has to step out in front of a crowd (Jack hates the limelight). Alas, The Nursery Crime division is his baby and he just wants to see it survive, so that means following the rules - most of the time. Jack is quick-witted and clever and is almost always underestimated - he's truly highly intelligent and others very rarely seem to see that in him.

Of course, it's generally always hidden under a thin veneer of droll, self-deprecating humour. He's determined, forthright, and really? Just a bit of a dag. He loves his wife, his children, and his job - a little more than he should, and you've gotta be a little off your rocker to work at the NCD so it's no wonder he's been called 'bonkers' too many times for it to be a joke. He knows how fiction works and, as a PDR himself, is the best bloke for the job. He's been called 'the Giant Killer' because he's allegedly killed three giants, two of which were 'just tall' and one of which was an accident and his old partner, the others self defense.

Also, Jack drives an Austin Allegro, quite possibly the worst car ever made in European history. He likes it, though.

CHARACTER'S BACKGROUND: Jack's been in Reading, England his entire life. It was a natural course for him to become a cop, and his career actually started out pretty well. He was successful, ambitious, and clever - and he was working with Friedland Chymes, one of the most celebrated detectives in Reading history. Unfortunately, Chymes and Spratt weren't meant to get along in the great scheme of things. When the serial killer, the Gingerbread Man, started his rampage through Reading and was finally stopped by Jack and another officer - who lost his life in the process - Chymes took the credit, and the fame and glory that came with it.

Then again, Jack got the girl - his first wife, who left Chymes for him, but passed away after some years as she would eat nothing but fat (and Jack would only eat lean). They had two children together, and Jack would eventually move on to marry Madeleine Usher (who he doesn't think is a PDR like himself but she is actually from Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Fall of the House of Usher'). She brought two children from her own first marriage and they consummated their relationship with one more, leaving Jack with a lovely little family to keep him relatively sane.

As corporate funding is based on public appeal, the Nursery Crime Division that Jack heads - the NCD - is at the bottom of the rung. It deals with nursery rhyme characters that have slipped through slices of reality and taken up lives in Reading, living as they would in their rhyme but often finding it difficult. No matter how hard they try not to, however, their stories always find their right ending. Jack can never get the convictions he tries for, a very important one being when he tried to convict the Three Little Pigs of premeditated murder - but the public would rather sympathize with cute pigs than the very mean. very scary and very dead Mr. Wolf. Jack had ambitions to get into the Most Worshipful Guild of Detectives, but he refused to apply, seeing as he could already see that he wouldn't be accepted - being generally more honest and sane than most of the detectives in the Guild. It didn't help that Chymes was a prominent member, either.

Jack was eventually appointed a new partner, Mary Mary, and together, along with the other NCD resident, Ashley (an alien, whose race had been watching British sitcoms and had come to Earth to ask why there hadn't been a third season of Fawlty Towers and are really incredibly dull) set out to solve the death of one Humpty Stuyvesant Van Dumpty III, otherwise known as Humpty Dumpty who fell off his wall. Along with some off-again, on-again members of the NCD who were really just loaned from other areas of the department, Jack and Mary continued the investigation and found that Humpty had quite a few people who would want to kill him. Jack quietly worked out that Mary was giving Friendland Chymes information on the side, and only revealed that he knew as such when she admitted it to him after realising that Jack was a far better horse to bet on. In the long run, at least. Maybe. Hopefully.

Jack suffered through an incident where he traded a painting of a cow for some magic beans for his mother, who threw them out her kitchen window - resulting in a huge beanstalk in their backyard, and Jack had to fight the urge not to climb it. In the end, it turned out that Humpty Dumpty had almost been poisoned by a scorned lover, was shot, and at that exact moment, hatched. Yes, he'd been injected with a serum by a crazy scientist that would create a creature that had a kitten's head and the body of a haddock, and it was very, very angry. At the same time, the Jellyman had come to town - a very prominent public figure who left people in awe wherever he went. He'd gone to visit the beanstalk, but Jack and Mary manage to get there in time. Chymes fled very unlike the glamorous hero he was meant to be, and the day was saved when the beanstalk fell and landed on the kitten-haddock and its creator, killing them both instantly. Jack fell through the roof of his mother's shed and landed safely on three bags of wool.

Jack lived through some fame and glory after that and was even offered a position at the Guild of Detectives, but he refused. After doubts arose concerning his handling of the Great Red-Legg'd Scissorman's arrest and the Red Riding Hood affair, he was suspended pending a mental health review. Mary promised to consult him on all cases, to bypass the suspension. They begin an investigation of porridge-smuggling by anthropomorphic bears. Jack's troubles increased when the argumentative Punches move in next door and his son adopts a sly and sticky-fingered pet. He was forced to reveal to his shocked wife that he is himself a PDR (Person of Dubious Reality). Furthermore, his psychiatrist was particularly sceptical about his claim that his new car repairs itself when no one is watching, and the car salesman (one Dorian Gray) who can prove his sanity couldn't be found. His self-esteem was somewhat restored when the newspaperman who was hounding him begged Jack's help in finding his missing sister 'Goldilocks'. It seemed she was working on an explosive story involving cucumber growers.

Meanwhile the Gingerbread Man, the notorious murderous biscuit, (or possibly cake, occasionally cookie) escaped custody leaving a trail of bodies; Jack was left frustrated when the case was given to an unimaginative officer outside NCD. While Jack and Mary were making enquiries about Goldilocks, they twice encounter the fugitive biscuit, but fail to capture him. Jack is then put in the doghouse with his commander, Briggs, after Briggs' wife lures him to a hotel in hopes of a saucy night, only for him to leave as soon as he realised who it was and what she wanted from him. After Briggs told Madeleine, his consequent marital problems were solved, surprisingly, by Punch and Judy - who turned out to be marriage counsellors.

It emerged that Goldilocks was involved in the porridge-smuggling after her body was discovered in the grim theme park Sommeworld. It came to pass that the Gingerbread Man was a hired assassin created by the Quangle-Wangle, a reclusive industrialist, and the 'Fourth Bear' was the head of NS-4, a secretive agency above the police department in rank. Jack had a final confrontation with the Gingerbread Man in Sommeworld, where it was discovered that the serial killer really was a biscuit - like Jack had thought all along - and dissolved into a lump and one singular cherry eye and Jack sprung the ceiling sprinklers. Jack rescued Mary from Sommeworld's explosive park before she could be blown to smithereens, and the Fourth Bear's attempted escaped was halted abruptly - he'd taken Jack's new Austin Allegro, which they had discovered would soon collapse in itself once the pedometer hit zero, and it did so just as the Bear was around the bend, thus ending his life.

Since then, Jack has been trying to get back into the swing of things - and even bought himself a new Allegro - but recently, stranger characters than those found in nursery rhymes have been making their way through Reading and leaving a mess in their wake. He's been contacted by the Canon Cops seeing as it's just his field of expertise.

( Most of the last bit is from here because I GOT LAZY. )

SAMPLE: "Run, run, as fast as you can! You can't catch me, I'm the-" Jack woke up suddenly, but not in the type of way that happens in movies, where the main characters fling back their covers and sit straight up in bed. No, he merely blinked, his face glued to his table - and likely the papers that were sitting on it, too. Reality came into focus slowly, everything blurry for the first few moments until his vision cleared and he was happy to find that there wasn't a seven foot biscuit leaning over his chair.

Jack sat up and rubbed his forehead, and then pulled a sheet of paper off his cheek and pushed it to the side of his desk. He'd fallen asleep in the office, which was never a good thing - not only was it tiny, but it was late, and if he'd gone home just a little bit earlier then he could have been comfortably having a bad dream curled up next to Madeleine, not welcoming a crick to his neck by slumping over his table.

Jack sighed with exasperation at himself and drew himself up from his chair, pulled on his jacket and fumbled around for his keys as he made his way from the office, a prickle at the back of his neck the only leftover from the unwanted dream he'd been having. He flicked the lights off in the office, locked the door and made his way down to the car park, where his Allegro was waiting. Jack slipped inside and stretched when he was seated, pausing very suddenly when something moved in the corner of his gaze. He spun around, frowning at the shadows that had formed outside of his car, near the car park's wall. They didn't move. Jack scratched his cheek (it had imprints from the ink on the paper he'd slept on) and scoffed to himself.

"Paranoia," he mumbled brusquely, started his car and drove off. After he had gone, a bright red apple rolled from the shadows and into the middle of the car park, where it came to a halt.

STORYLINES: Mainly him just getting involved with the CC and such, the whole rip thing being in his line of work, I think. Um. I have no other ideas yet!