Karli Perrault
From Literepetition
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What do you get when you mix fairy-tales and urban legend?
Contents |
[edit] Biography
Born in 1988 to Peter and Peggy Perrault in Providence, RI, Karli was the couple's second child. Her brother, Jean-Claude (Jack), is three years older than she is. Her father runs a construction company (and, it is said, has fingers into the corrupt pies of the local political machine), and her mother is a French and Spanish tutor for wealthy prep-school kids. Her own family was quite well-to-do, but socially 'beneath' the families her mother's work served.
She was a bright and reasonably happy child. She was known for irritating adults around her with consistent queries about 'why?', and had no shame or shyness about asking personal or probing questions. After getting beaten up on the playground a few times for asking the wrong questions early in grammar school, she did two things: bribed her brother into teaching her to fight, and developed a sharp tongue toward people who took offense.
Karli (as her friends and family call her) has always questioned things: authority, reasoning, facts. She was raised Catholic, and attended parochial schools through the eighth grade, but she spent enough time questioning her teachers and the nuns about the truth of their dogmas that her parents were politely informed that she might be better suited for a public school. Her grades were good enough that she was admitted to the very competitive Classical High School, and there she excelled in stirring up tempests, playing pranks, surfing the net obsessively, and dating a string of smart-but-unsuitable fellow students, at least two of them female.
She completed high school with reasonably good grades despite having spent a lot of her time playing in a band (the Choking Dobermans), seeking out various and sundry pop culture obsessions du jour, and basically blowing off routine as much as possible. She was admitted in Fall 2006 to Radcliffe, and matriculated there as a Sociology major. Karli took college semi-seriously for the first year, and made a good GPA. Summertime changed all of that, though, as she wound up traveling a bit with friends she made through the web site she'd built that catalogued and discussed urban legend, modern folklore, and Americana.
After spending most of that summer driving around New England in search of roadside attractions and historical sites and other curiosities, she lost a lot of her interest in academia in favor of more road trips on weekends and such. Her grades began to slip a bit. Come the spring of 2008, her sophomore year, she wasn't showing up to classes at all, and was placed on academic probation. Her response was to take incompletes for the semester and decide to spend some time traveling to get the wanderlust out of her system.
She moved back home, and after a few weeks, packed up her VW bug and took off on a long and meandering sojourn. Her family was less than thrilled by this, but indulgently provided her with money to live on, and called her cell phone frequently to ask when she'd be home. Aside from the holidays (for which she was in Providence), that 15 months was spent hitting every possible corner of the Lower Forty-Eight that held any appeal at all to her. If there was a roadside attraction left unseen, an oddball little town unnoticed, or a noteworthy murder site left unvisited, it wasn't due to negligence. Karli stayed with net friends, blogged from the road, and took copious photos and journal notes about what she saw.
At some point in the fall of 2008, she actually returned home to Providence. Radcliffe has decided not to accept her back to the college, but a packet from two years ago from Meridian that she'd ignored and stuffed in a closet suddenly became an option. She found it, reapplied for the school and scholarship, and was accepted.
She re-matriculated in Spring 2009, now just 21 and a little more settled, with close to a hundred thousand miles of driving under her belt.
[edit] Personal information
Fall 2009 Schedule:
Deviance and Social Control
Folklore of the Americas
Literary Fairy Tales
Social Psychology
Appearance: Karli is a brown-eyed brunette of average height (5'5") and build, attractive, with a bit of a Providence accent. She has a low voice, husky from natural tendency, roughened by a slight cigarette habit. She tends to dress casually, in clean but comfortable things. Her shirts tend to be brought to you by the letter T, her jeans always show some fray around the knees and seat, and are faded beyond 'pre-washing' into 'any more bleach and these may fall apart,' and she favors sneakers or practical work boots.
Personality: Think of a young female version of Fox Mulder combined with all three Lone Gunmen, without the FBI connection or Oxford education, but with the fascination for all things bizarre, extraordinary, or unexplained. Add in a love of stories from all cultures, fairy tales, mythology and folklore. Spice with a dash of giddy energy, a love for rock music, and a passion for all things Americana, and stir in a cup of 'spoiled younger child.' Bake for about a year and a half on the road in a red VW Beetle, seeing America.
Skills, Talents, Likes, Assorted Traits:
- Speaks French and Spanish almost-fluently, albeit with a horrible New England accent. Also speaks smatterings of several other languages due to her travels.
- Has a good husky alto singing voice and used to be in a band during high school. Also plays a bit of guitar and bass.
- Adores kitsch, pop culture, urban legends, memes and all manner of more historical fairy tales, mythology, and folklore.
- Decently-skilled hobbyist photographer, for the sake of chronicling her travels and stories.
- Has a huge database of all the bizarre local folklore, legend, etc. she's come across on her trip.
- Currently some kind of weird eclectic pantheist-pagan mix which includes the Catholic saints and angels and a bunch of gods from various places.
- Reasonably competent with web layout and database design.
Flaws, Drawbacks, and Dislikes:
- Scattered and not very driven toward long-term goals.
- Smokes moderately.
- Really dislikes pretentiousness and forced ennui. Also mocks emo kids mercilessly.
- Addicted to caffeine. Shocker.
- Possesses all the tact, restraint, and social filtering of a rockslide.
[edit] Reputation
[edit] Rumors
- She's Joey Ramone's illegitimate daughter.
[edit] Relationships
People make impressions, after all...
[edit] The Fairy Tale
- Trisha Freeman: My shiny new girlfriend. Smart, beautiful, fascinating, driven with passion to a lot of directions. Unconventional, and unapologetic for it.
[edit] Urban Legends:
The Choking Doberman, the Concrete Car, and:
- Louisa Alcott (aka Loopy): A frequent visitor and commenter at dL, and now I've met her in person and we've become pretty fast friends after a summer in Hell Lay. She's wicked cool.
- Ian Fleming: English, dry-humored, and possessed of grace under pressure. So far, pure peppermint-scented awesome.
- Dash Hammett: The guy with all the gossip, and now Loopy's housemate. Dash is like the male, hardboiled version of me. We're like the Nosy Twins. I love it.
- Lucy Montgomery: My apartment-mate, and apparently, my new partner in crime. This... holds such promise.
- Emilio Salgari: Arrrrr! Italian pirate dude who managed to get me to 'rescue' his monkey-buddy Fingers. Fun as hell. Completely madcap. He liked it, he put a ring on it. And no, he's not my boyfriend.
[edit] True Tales:
Guaranteed 100 percent real, I swear!
- Jane Austen: A wonderful source of campus lore and history! She's been incredibly helpful and pleasant.
- Eric Blair: My guitar teacher, and a pretty cool and funny guy.
- Amber Bierce: I swear to Pan's hairy ass, she hates me, which is a shame because she's funny in a really bitter and pissed off way.
- P. Shelley: The Abs of the Gods attached to a guy who is funny, intelligent and cool? I'm diggin' that.
- Mark Twain: Beer buddy, storyteller, all around fun guy. Dunno about that groupie thing, though - but he seems to have the same thing I do where he says shit first and considers it later.
[edit] Unsubstantiated rumors:
Snopes needs to work on these, because the jury's still out.
- George Byron: Not sure what to make of this guy. If I believe half the rumors he is like the Epicenter of All Drama at Meridian. He's also like half of Dash's frak map all by himself.
- Shiloh Freud: Yeah, because being a Folklore/Sociology major doesn't teach me anything about oral tradition. I dunno. She seems kind of like a shapeshifting space alien dropped onto Earth to understand human mating rituals or something. Must be all the polls.
- Ernest Hemingway: Macho, but not without a sense of humor about it. Writes, also. Must poke him for more about the semi-truck.
- Vladimir Nabokov: Polite enough, at least to everyone but Dash and Jane, but OMGWTFDweeeeeebtastic.
- Minnie Peake: A ghost witness. These tales should be fascinating!
- John Polidori: The Dorm Vampire of Meridian. Can't wait to hear this story.
- E. John Wilmot, Jr.: I've seen his junk and we've never even met in person. He OWES me, damnit.
[edit] Legends in their own minds:
Debunked, discredited, and dismissed.
[edit] Net.Stories:
Karli knows a surprising number of people online from her site, dot.Lore, among them:
- Arthur Doyle: Always seeking out the details, this one. A fine mind for them, too.
- Jake Grimm: A real devotee of folk tales, from all evidence.
- Ann Ward: Aficionado of all tales gory and terrifying.
