Application

[nopolicelikeholmes]

"You don't mind the smell of strong tobacco,
I hope?"

"I always smoke 'ship's' myself," I answered.

"That's good enough. I generally have chemicals about, and occasionally
do experiments. Would that annoy you?"

"By no means."

"Let me see--what are my other shortcomings. I get in the dumps at
times, and don't open my mouth for days on end. You must not think I am
sulky when I do that. Just let me alone, and I'll soon be right."

[player nick / name]: Chi

[series]: Original
[character]: Shirley Holmes
[character history / background]: As might be obvious from the name, Shirley takes a good deal of her background from the original Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It's been heavily adapted to accommodate not only the gender-swap of Holmes and Watson, but a modern time period, a U.S. setting (specifically, New England), and much younger protagonists.

Shirley comes from a privileged background, but a somewhat broken family. Her father is a successful attorney in Boston and her mother is an heiress living in western Massachusetts - they divorced when she was very young. For a while they maintained joint custody so that she and her older sister, May, were constantly going back and forth across the state. The arrangement kind of fell apart when May went off to college, so Shirley ended up staying in Lenox with their mother, with whom she has kind of an adversarial relationship. Her relationship to her father isn't much better - positive, but withdrawn - so May is really the only family member she's all that close to. Even then, they're kind of distant from each other, because May is seven years older to begin with and they've been living apart since Shirley was in middle school.

In any case, Shirley spent her adolescent years being kind of asocial and solving tiny baby mysteries. Most other kids were put off by her uncanny powers of deduction, so she didn't have any friends per se - but she developed a small reputation for solving unusual problems, both at the private school she attended and at the nearby public school. Somewhere in there she was also in the boxing club and took fencing lessons, but aside from puzzles and maybe chemistry her main passion is playing the violin. Despite being skilled in so many areas - or perhaps because of it - she ended up drifting directionlessly through high school and getting accepted into a very prestigious college with very little idea of what she ultimately wanted to do in life.

Being from such wildly different backgrounds and having such different priorities, she and Jane Watson didn't quite get along when they were first assigned together as freshman roommates. Watson was almost as old as May, seemed to have a very grounded and stable kind of personality, and knew where she wanted to go in life - so they had very different ideas about things like sleeping schedules and what constituted appropriate levels of untidiness. It eventually worked, however, both because Holmes really, really wanted it to and because Watson was apparently somewhat fascinated by her - fascinated enough, at least, to allow herself to be dragged all over the campus to solve mysteries. They soon became close friends mostly on the basis of a shared fascination with the unusual, but also a sort of mutual respect of one another's intellect and fondness for one another's senses of humor.

Although Holmes didn't initially set out to basically become a private investigator for the school, her own curiosity combined with word-of-mouth referrals from the few people who knew of her from high school just sort of naturally led her to cases. She didn't particularly approve when Jane started livetweeting their adventures as a way of taking notes - and, later on, self-publishing full accounts of them - but it very quickly led to even more cases. It got to the point where, in order to continue operating, Holmes had to make it an official thing and start the only consulting detective club in the world. Professor Moriarty agreed to be their faculty advisor, and Irene Adler and Mary Morstan signed up as nominal (but not very active) members to give them the minimum number needed to charter a school club - but also because both ladies were decent detectives in their own rights.

By the point I'm taking her from, Shirley has consulted on several cases for fellow students, campus security, and once or twice even for the actual police. One of the former cases was analogous to "A Scandal in Bohemia," and ultimately ended with her and Irene Adler dating for like a month. Having had her first and so far only romantic relationship with another lady was ultimately a positive experience for Holmes - suddenly a lot of gender-identity things made a lot more sense to her - but it didn't really work out with Irene in the end due to conflicts in personality and priorities. Basically, Shirley just wanted to run off and solve puzzles, but Irene wanted attention. And maybe also a man.

[character personality]: Shirley is very logical. Almost the first thing she does on meeting Jane is list off her major flaws as a roommate - or at least what she thinks are her flaws - with the idea that if they can tolerate one another's worst traits they'll do well as roommates. She then proceeds to confess that she smokes, does chemistry experiments in the bedroom, has depressive episodes, and some people think she's creepy. In addition, her responses to Watson's list of flaws reveal that she's somewhat messy and also that she gives nosy people the cold shoulder, which she considers to be be minor flaws.

Despite being able to produce a fairly long list of what she describes as personal faults, she doesn't seem terribly interested in changing any of them - unless it's necessary to do so in order to keep the peace between herself and Watson. Holmes had a very strong desire to make that roommate situation work from the outset, because it was her first time away from home and her first time living with anyone who wasn't family. To be honest, she was a little bit afraid of being rejected on her first try. Plus, they were basically stuck with each other and she didn't want to spend the whole year hating or being hated by someone she had to sleep next to. So, Shirley went into the situation assuming that she was more difficult to live with than the average person and resolving to do everything she could to be as accommodating as possible.

She honestly did keep to her resolution, for the most part. When Watson said that she liked to sleep in, Holmes decided to schedule all of her classes such that she wouldn't need to use an alarm clock and risk waking Watson up. Similarly, after they had had several fights, Shirley suggested a rule of thumb by which they could avoid most future arguments: Shirley would be presumed to be right in any dispute about whether something had happened a certain way, but she was to defer to Jane by default if there was any question as to whether or not it should have happened that way. So, Jane would have to agree that she had never specifically said that Shirley couldn't play the violin while she was studying, but Shirley would have to concede that she really should have known better. Since the latter kinds of argument were generally more important this arrangement worked out in Watson's favor.

It's worth noting, though, that Holmes only suggested that arrangement because Watson had already proven herself to be such an earnest person as to never think to abuse it. Shirley is normally very protective of her boundaries, and confident in her right to enforce them. Unlike most girls her age, she doesn't suffer from any need to answer questions or do things that make her uncomfortable just for the sake of getting along with people.

She also doesn't feel the need to change who she is as a person, for the same reasons. Everyone has flaws and merits, and while she's not opposed to the idea of self-improvement, she doesn't have any anxiety about having an insufficient number of merits or an over-abundance of flaws. She simply concerns herself with getting along with the people she needs or wants to get along with - by being polite, kind, and accommodating as necessary - and doesn't worry about whether or not she's a good person overall.

Incidentally, if asked, she'd claim moral neutrality - a trait she'd profess to share with the overwhelming majority of human beings. Shirley has a strong sense of justice, but it's her own kind of justice. She prefers the spirit of the law to the letter, and in some cases has no problem with taking justice into her own hands if she thinks the matter will slip through the cracks of law enforcement. That's why she is glad she isn't actually in law enforcement - as a consultant she only has to answer to her own conscience.

[point in timeline you're picking your character from]: The middle of sophomore year. By this point Holmes and Watson are pretty used to one another's idiosyncrasies and are fairly close as friends. It's difficult to say what the equivalent point would be in the original canon because we're still writing their canon and the cases have been shuffled, changed, and added to. The analogues to "A Scandal In Bohemia", A Study In Scarlet, "The Boscombe Valley Mystery," and The Sign of the Four have all definitely occurred, though.