Earl

Gender: Male

Pronouns: he/him

Sexuality: Bi

Occupation: Researcher

Physical Description 

• Tall and lanky, with an Erlenmeyer flask instead of a head
  • His head's full of an unidentifiable, fizzy liquid
  • The stronger his emotions, the more the liquid bubbles and sloshes around
    • When he's emotional past the point of reason, his head literally boils over
  • The liquid sometimes shifts colors too
• Almost always wearing his lab coat; feels naked without it

Personality 

• Giant excited dork
• Turns into a kid witnessing his first baking soda volcano every time he does literally anything in his lab
• Yells constantly - not out of anger, just because he's always psyched about SCIENCE
  • Often yells SCIENCE for no reason
• Pretty naïve when it comes to social interaction, but he's so pure that nobody's willing to get nasty with him (and tbh he wouldn't notice if they did unless they were overtly hostile)
• Terrible at picking up on others' emotions, doesn't get hints
  • He likes to listen to people's problems and try to help them out, but he doesn't always grasp the full issue
  • He's good just for listening and offering sympathy, but if he's asked for advice, it'll usually be simplistic at best
• Highly skeptical, demands a reliable scientific source for everything
  • And, no, "studies have shown" is not good enough if you can't even name the titles/authors of the studies

Likes 

• S C I E N C E
  • Chemistry in particular is his one true love, though he also has a soft spot for physics, biology, geology...you name it, he'll study it in his lab
• Wade, his lab assistant
  • He needs to lighten up sometimes, but he's far more responsible than Earl, and Earl does appreciate his help
  • They have a lot of fun together experimenting with with volatile substances
  • Earl's developed a sneaking suspicion that Wade's totally crushing on him, but he's playing dumb about it because he doesn't want to embarrass Wade, especially if it turns out his hunch is wrong
    • At the very least he needs more empirical evidence that Wade's totally crushing on him before presenting his findings to his scientific peers
• Throwing down in a rigorous scientific debate with people touting questionable information

Dislikes 

• Chemical spills, broken glassware
  • Goes double if he's not quite sure what chemical(s) the spill is composed of
  • Breaking stuff's always annoying too, but breaking glass specifically always makes him cringe extra hard
• Pseudoscience 
  • He won't hesitate to call people "quacks"
  • Mentioning alternative medicine is a quick way to get him fired up
  • Don't go to the grocery store with him; he'll spend the whole time grumbling about "no added chemicals," "non-GMO," and other unfortunate labels
    • "WATER is a chemical you UNEDUCATED MASSES"
• Magic, the supernatural in general 
  • He will immediately ruin everyone's fun by...
    • ...feeding a psychic bullshit information just to call them out on their cold reading tactics
    • ...lecturing everyone at a séance about the ideomotor effect while they're trying to use the Ouija board
    • ...describing in detail the anatomy of a basking shark when confronted with a photo of a dead "sea monster"
    • ...describing in detail the unreliability of eyewitnesses and the anatomy of barn owls when confronted with accounts of various "aliens"
    • ...et cetera, et cetera, he's a skeptic through and through

Personal Info 

• He's literally just a cartoon mad scientist, though he's far more playful than evil
• He's irresponsible, but not reckless - he harps on lab safety whenever anyone enters the doors, and uses a broom to literally sweep people back out the door if they come in wearing anything less than a tee shirt, long pants, and closed-toed shoes
  • ...although he does have the tendency to handle potentially dangerous substances with a little less caution than they deserve
• Sometimes, his general naiveté works in his favor when he does catch on to nuances in people's emotions or speech, because he can easily play it off like he hasn't noticed and nobody will bat an eye
• Gets so caught up in the anticipation of an interesting reaction (and the excitement of watching it go) that he's terrible about keeping notes when preparing or observing a reaction
  • He's self-aware enough to notice that about himself, and that's part of the reason he hired Wade
• Wade is probably running the lab honestly; Earl's just fooling around with dangerous chemicals

Trivia 

• His name does, in fact, come from the Erlenmeyer flask that is his head.  I am lazy and bad at names.

Date of Creation / Adoption: Sometime in...2013, maybe?  2014?  Argh.