RUNDSTROM, emery ansel

[emery ansel rundstrom]

E M E R Y - A N S E L - R U N D S T R O M ,

nicknames ,
- - - Em.
age ,
- - - Fifteen.
occupation ,
- - - student, professional figure skater.
member group ,
- - - sophomore.

personality ,
- - - obsessive, clueless, insecure, perfectionist, childlike, epic fail, awkward, sweet, untrusting, petty, introverted, profound, romantic, poetry-nut, skittish, over-emotional, passionate, determined, quiet, self-conscious

family ,
- - -
Grandmother │ Annelise Rundstrom (nee Klauser), 59, ‘retired’ figure skater
Mother │ Edith Rundstrom, deceased at age 25 (five years ago)
Aunt │ Marion Rundstrom, deceased at age 30 (five years ago)
Aunt │ Dettie Rundstrom, 24, Guidance counsellor at Norrington
Cousin │ G_____ Rundstrom, 14, Norrington student (twin)
Cousin │ Geneva Rundstrom, 14, Norrington student (twin)

history ,
- - -

For most of her life, figure skating was the sole ambition of Annelise Klauser. She was born in Differdange, Luxembourg, into a middle-class family in the summer of 1950. Annelise took up figure skating at the age of nine, and knew right then that it was everything she wanted to do with her life. And Annelise soon became one of the best child figure skaters in Luxembourg and the surrounding countries of France and Germany. She competed in international competitions, winning awards and media coverage. Even so, Annelise remained down-to-earth, perhaps a bit gruff at times, and fiercely competitive. Annelise pushed herself hard in her sport, eventually qualifying for the 1968 Winter Olympics in Grenoble, France. For Annelise, it was like her spectacular career – although she was still quite young, at only 17 years of age – was finally culminating to something great. Anneliese earned a silver medal for Luxembourg, which she currently hangs above the mantel.

Annelise, ever-ambitious, attempted a triple lutz in a world championship a year later – no woman having landed a triple lutz before at that point – but suffered a devastating fall, which shattered her kneecap. Doctors told Annelise that she might never walk properly again. Figure skating was absolutely out of the question. Annelise tried to pick up the sport again, but found that she was unable to bend that leg the way she needed to. Eventually, after many years of struggling through rehabilitation, Annelise managed to re-enter the competitive world of figure skating, but only for a few seasons. Due to her years of missed training, Annelise fell flat in several competitions, and didn’t qualify for the ’76 Olympics, which devastated her. She decided her career was then over. Annelise settled down, married an accountant named Francois Rundstrom, moved to Luxembourg City with him, and gave birth to three children – Marion, Edith and Dettie. She worked as a figure skating coach for young children during those years, but Annelise was still disturbed by the unfortunate end to her skating career. But Annelise was a good mother, although rather strict at times. The family was shaken when Francois suddenly died in a car accident, leaving Annelise with three children to raise on her own. She never remarried.

The financial situation of the Rundstroms was hurt slightly by the patriarch’s death, but they managed to hold their ground. It was Marion, the oldest daughter, who truly took care of her younger siblings as Annelise worked hard all day, leaving her job as a coach to work at the local news station, which she hated. Once they managed to get back on their feet economically, Annelise pushed her daughters harder to take up figure skating, as she had been doing all their lives. If she couldn’t skate, then she could at least try and live vicariously through her daughters. Marion, at the age of nineteen, married and moved to another city, where she attended the university. Edith, who had always been the rebel of the bunch – getting into fights, drinking, smoking and sleeping around – managed to get herself pregnant at the age of fifteen, the father unknown, since there were so many possibilities. And so Emery Ansel Rundstrom was welcomed into the world. Then, roughly a year later, the twins were born of Marion and her husband. Apparently, Marion had been having marital problems, and so by the time the twins were two years old, Marion had divorced her husband and moved back to Luxembourg City to live with her sisters, mother and nephew. The family spoke primarily Luxembourgish, proper German, fairly decent English, and some French.

As a toddler, Emery was always compassionate and full of life. Even at such a young age, he tried to ‘take care’ of his mother, who had been on a downward spiral ever since he had been born. Under Anneliese’ pressuring, Edith took a job as a waitress at a small café. She was soon fired for smoking and drinking on her shift, as well as doing a wholly-unsatisfactory job. At that point, Anneliese gave up on her middle daughter. The former Olympian managed to hold the family together, though, earning herself a promotion where she worked. Emery was slightly scared of the firm-handed, intimidating woman that was his grandmother, but he followed her every word with the utter devotion of a dog to its master. As soon as she could – which was when Emery was six – Anneliese put her only grandson into figure skating, which he quickly fell in love with. He was young enough to not have any qualms about the sport being too ‘girly’. Anneliese was extraordinarily proud of Emery’s immediate passion and talent for figure skating, although she didn’t begin to spoil him. If anything, Annelise pushed the young boy even harder, taking him out to the local ice rink for extra lessons when she had the time. She also managed to bully Marion into putting her two twin girls into figure skating classes.

School was always difficult for Emery. He was of average intelligence, although he excelled in languages and the arts. Even so, his grades didn’t reflect his intellect – Emery faced such a massive amount of bullying that even by the age of ten he would be skipping classes, forgetting to do coursework, and had difficulty concentrating during lessons. It wasn’t just his favourite sport, figure skating, which made him a target for the other children at school, although it was a large factor. Having grown up in an entirely female-dominated family, Emery was, to put it gently, rather girly. He did extraordinarily well in sports, as he was physically fit from figure skating, and he expressly didn’t wear pinks or purples to school, but the boys in his grade still called him “mädchenhaften knaben” (German for girly boy) behind his back and sometimes to his face. Was it his fault that he cried when the teacher read sad poems in class? Was it his fault that he just didn’t find trying to look up the girls’ skirts in the stairwells amusing? No. Not his fault, he decided. But the boys Emery’s age were still fond of calling him names, excluding him to the point where literally every single one of his friends was female, and on occasion tossing twigs and pebbles at him and shoving him into walls. In addition to the bullying, the school was of German language, and although Emery was fluent in actual German, he occasionally slipped up and fell back into the highly-similar Luxembourgish, which gave his peers another excuse to laugh at him. Emery couldn’t imagine things getting any worse.

But when he was ten, he and his cousins received the terrible news one night that his mother Edith and aunt Marion, mother of the twins, had mysteriously vanished, Marion’s driver’s license found in a banged-up car that wasn’t her own, which had been crashed into a ditch somewhere out in the country. Emery was devastated, although he managed to win a national competition in children’s figure skating that took place only a week after his mother and aunt’s disappearance. Two weeks after that, their bodies were found by the police in the southern part of Luxembourg, Marion with a bullet through the head, Edith was found, upon autopsy, to have been poisoned with arsenic. The police ruled it a murder suicide, but Emery wasn’t satisfied. At the funeral, he didn’t cry, trying to look strong in the eyes of his remaining aunt, Dettie, his grandmother Marion, and his two cousins. Later, though, he cried for hours in his room. The family was crippled by the deaths of Marion and Edith. Although there were now two less mouths to feed, Marion had been roughly half the family’s income, and Emery’s figure skating lessons were expensive. Anneliese settled for taking him out of those lessons and fully coaching him herself, and although Emery still progressed as a skater, she wasn’t all that happy about it. Emery didn’t have a very difficult time getting over his mother’s death, since she hadn’t been much in the ways of maternal presence or even a guiding hand, but even so, he was slightly shaken for a few months.

When he was eleven, Emery skated with Adelaide for the first time. His old partner, Nastia, moved back to Russia, and so his grandmother put him with Adelaide, who had recently moved from Germany, and was as talented a skater as him. They hit it off immediately, and were a star pair, competing and winning often. Adelaide was one of Emery’s dearest friends – although he didn’t have many friends at all – and they did practically everything together. Emery was still being bullied at school, though, and it had gotten worse. Now that he was older, the other boys beat on him, occasionally shoved him down stairs and the insults were worse as well, mostly calling him ‘gay’ or a ‘queer’. Unlike before, Emery wouldn’t cry outright at the insults, instead trying to shrug them off. Eventually, he got used to the torment. Slowly and unexpectedly, he began to develop a crush on one of his main tormenters – a boy named Vincent. This troubled Emery quite deeply, and he slipped into denying the idea that he was gay or even bi, which made it difficult to explain that at twelve, he had little to no attraction towards girls, which he later found out was not so. When he was thirteen, Adelaide expressed to Emery that she had feelings for him. Then, suddenly, Adelaide was the light of his life and they shared a much-too-short year of tween romantic bliss. The week before Emery turned fourteen, Adelaide broke the news that she was moving to the United States the following day. She didn’t leave an address, phone number, or even a zip code, and didn’t try and contact him again. Emery was heartbroken, unable to comprehend why she had left him in the dark so long. From that point, he pushed himself even harder into figure skating (he quite pairs) and school, picking his grades up far beyond what he’d thought he could ever accomplish. He wasn’t strangely smart, but the sheer amount of work he put in was enough to raise his grades to some of the highest in his school.

When he was fourteen, Dettie announced that she had gotten a job in California, working at a school. Anneliese, who didn’t want to split up the family – or have to support three children on her own – decided that it would be best to move the entire family to California as well. Emery, wanting things to be different in America, begged and pleaded to be enrolled in private school, where, he believed, the inevitable bullying would be dealt more vigilantly. Anneliese gave him a firm no, since they couldn’t afford it. Somewhat desperate, Emery applied himself even more into academics for that final year in Luxembourg, and managed to secure himself a scholarship to attend Norrington for his sophomore year. The family moved together to a decent-sized house just outside Santa Ria, and only a week later, they found out that a cousin of Anneliese’s had died, and left her nearly 100,000 euros, roughly 135,000 dollars. The family, which had lived for a long time with a patchy financial history, was overjoyed. Anneliese put Emery into a private skating club, and declared that the twins could attend Norrington as well.
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HEY THERE, I'M IZZY AND I'M FOURTEEN YEARS OLD! I'VE BEEN RUNNING AROUND THE ROLEPLAY WORLD FOR 3 OR 4 YEARS AND YOU CAN CHECK OUT MY ROLEPLAY SAMPLE BELOW! AS YOU CAN SEE, I'M USING GASPARD ULLIEL AS THE PLAY-BY FOR THIS CHARACTER. OH, AND MY OTHER CHARACTERS ARE ALEC DEVERE AND GENIE LISLE!

Yeah, uh………