[colour=#000000]Name: [/colour][colour=#000000]Clockwise[/colour] [colour=#000000]Sex: [/colour][colour=#000000]Male[/colour] [colour=#000000]Age: [/colour][colour=#000000]Middle-aged Stallion[/colour] [colour=#000000]Species: [/colour][colour=#000000]Unicorn[/colour] [colour=#000000]Coat colour: [/colour][colour=#000000]A dusky grey-purple. (Hex: [/colour][colour=#663366]715381[/colour][colour=#000000])[/colour] [colour=#000000]Mane/Tail/Markings colour & Style: [/colour][colour=#000000]Red, curly, tangled and awfully messy. ([/colour][colour=715381]Hex: [/colour][colour=#993300]715381[/colour] and [colour=#cc6600]e48837[/colour]) [colour=#000000]Eye colour: [/colour][colour=#000000]Purply-grey [/colour] [colour=#000000]Cutie Mark: [/colour][colour=#000000]A large golden gear with twelve teeth and two clock hands inside of it, pointing at 2:55. (Picture!) (Hex: [/colour][colour=#cccc66]f0d878[/colour][colour=#000000])[/colour] [colour=#000000]Physique: Scrawny and scruffy and knobbly. Clockwise has a crooked, pointy snout, and visible age lines under his eyes and smiling crow's feet at the corners. In contrast, though, he also has freckles that add a dash of youth to his tired face and some pretty prominent front teeth.[/colour] [colour=#000000]Origin: [/colour][colour=#000000]Fet Loch[/colour] [colour=#000000]Roleplay Type: Mane RP Occupation: Professor, wizard (with the documentation to prove it), clockmaker (mostly as a hobby now).[/colour] [colour=#000000]Motivation: [/colour][colour=#000000]Exploring time, be it through theory or thought or magic.[/colour] [colour=#000000]Likes: [/colour][colour=#000000]Things that go tick tock, tradition, hugs, bow ties, socks, reading, intelligent conversations, history, theory[/colour] [colour=#000000]Dislikes: [/colour][colour=#000000]People commenting on his speech impediment, being startled, cats, rambunctiousness[/colour] [colour=#000000]Character Summary:[/colour] Clockwise is an awkward, stuttering, clumsy pony, and if it weren't for the fact that he is obviously an older fellow, it might be quite easy to mistake him for a bumbling young colt simply by his mannerisms and the nervous and often silly way by which he goes about things. Despite his goofiness, though, he is quite gentle and kindly, like somebody's quirky uncle. If ponies wore pants, Clockwise would probably forget his on a regular basis. Exceedingly partial to the traditional customs of the powerful unicorns of history, Clockwise is rarely seen without his floppy, tattered purple hat that's certainly seen better days, though he is tragically incapable of growing a beard. He is considered an endearing eccentric by most of his colleagues, but enjoys a level of respect for his work. Though his talent isn't magic, per se, he undoubtedly qualifies as a wizard, both on account of his enviable collection of spellbooks and because his default repertoire of spells is rather large and diverse, even if they're primarily intended for convenience. Convenience, after all, saves time! History: Born to two unicorn parents, Clockwise began life as a long-legged, wobbly, timid colt, and he hasn't changed all that much in that regard. He spent most of his foalhood days frolicking around the verdant hills of Fet Loch by himself, nibbling new flowers in the spring and sticking out like a sore thumb against the snow in the winter; he was quite content to be alone, used to it, in fact, for not having ever had a sibling, and he shied often from other foals out of nervousness. Perhaps he was often lonely, but Clockwise found other things to keep himself entertained during the many hours he spent by himself. Clockwise was the sort of young pony that liked things. All kinds of things--everything! He loved to watch them and try to figure out how they worked--carriages and chimneys, lilypads and feathers, clouds and the sun and the moon and the stars; he learned about how magic was at the heart of the world, and took great pride in his own capacity to wield it in its rawest form, enchanted quite early by the concept, and practicing it regularly, with mixed but always entertaining results. He read books, too, as many books as he could get his hooves on, on magic and fact and fiction, with those tales that sit under the veil that divides history from story being his favorite. Clockwise enjoyed old tales of great unicorns, the legends of ancient royals, the many different recollections of the making of the world, and hundreds of others, all spun from the fertile thread of myth and wonder. Some, of course, were truer than others, though he may never know which. He was a fanciful young pony, too, and a lot of his assumptions about the way things worked were full of silly explanations that made perfect sense to him, but not so much to anypony else, and he blissfully forgot, or pretended to forget, less romantic reasonings. During his bookish indulgences, Clockwise found a very thick volume full of lines and equations, and was introduced directly to the mechanisms of one of the most complicated devices he had ever seen: a clock. He knew what a clock was, of course, but there was something different about seeing the intricate mechanics laid bare upon the pages of a book like the delicate bones of a bird wing. They were so complex that he couldn't understand them just by looking at them! He decided immediately that he therefore had to learn everything about them, and as he was an older colt by this time, he was gladly taken in as an apprentice to a local earth pony artisan when he went about expressing his interest in happy babblings to anyone who'd listen. Learning the trade alongside some basic unicorn schooling, Clockwise proved a diligent, if bumbling, worker, which he still is today; clocks were much more complex and difficult to build and understand than he could have thought, having grown up believing his own theory that stars were broken diamonds and other things of the variety, but time managed to change even his clumsiness into something of finesse, at least when working with timepieces, which he grew to love more than any other thing he had watched or studied, even his stories. Perhaps it was the smell of the wood, or the sound of the tick, the joy of piecing together something almost as complex as a living thing; whatever the case, clocks were suddenly his favorite thing in the world. He made many errors, and often, but his master had taken a shine to him, and was encouraging and kind in his criticism. Clockwise quickly grasped his problems and the things he had to do to fix them, and as he improved and was able to allow his mind to wander more as he worked, an even greater complexity became obvious to him--why, not clocks, and not clouds, or even magic! It was the greatest complexity of all, the greatest mystery that ever existed. It was time, and every bit of the young pony began to burn with wonder and eagerness and a most profound desire to comprehend it. He turned, of course, to his books, digging up every myth related to time, every story, every legend--and the rest, as they say, is history. Clockwise never actually learned the nature of time, though he spent many hours on trying. As he grew into his long legs, he became singularly obsessed with it, attempting over the years such impossibilities as trying to find the exact length of a moment, or the true nature of the present, or the engine that keeps time running. His search took him on plenty of journeys, both through libraries and over miles of dusty road. Something clicked in his head one day--the timesense, a passive comprehension of the passing of time, and an incredible capacity to be always aware of the hour and the minute and the second of the day, of the date and the season and the year, of his precise temporal position. It was a deep realization, but impossible to understand; Clockwise doesn't know how his timesense works, but the world is full of mysteries, and in the way that some ponies are good at finding their way, or know when something is going to happen, Clockwise just knows what time it is, always. The unlocking of the strange sense granted the fumbling young pony his cutie mark, and when asked about it now, he smiles absently in a way that crinkles the corners of his grey eyes, which become bright and vague with memory. With age, the timesense developed, and Clockwise can crisply recall dates and times with extraordinary accuracy. Of course, when one feels the passing of every moment, those moments become so much more valuable. Clockwise recognized the significance of time, and there is almost nothing else in the world that is more important to him now. Time is the catalyst through which all other things happen, after all, and slowly the pony's love and fascination began to grow into a worry; other ponies around him thought nothing of time beyond the flimsy boundary of dates and hours and days and nights, and this worry crested during the return of Nightmare Moon, and again at the freeing of the spirit Discord, for fear of what either entity and their great power would do to the progression of the hours and the days. Other ponies feared the presence of chaos, or the eternity of night--but Clockwise, in addition to these, feared what either of these might do to something far more fundamental to existence. Perhaps he worried in futility, for no great temporal ill came of either occasion, but Clockwise still dreads, in some deep place in his heart of hearts, that one day all of the monsters and nightmares that he had read about in his books would free themselves from their ancient prisons and do something terrible to the fabric of time. After all, very real events had already proven at least two of the fairy tales to be true. Following his apprenticeship and his first few searches for the nature of time, Clockwise fell back into his old scholarly ways, using the money he had made through his clockmaking to pursue an education in magical theory. He soon grew up from a curious young stallion into a knowledgeable older one, and decided that he may find his answers not out in the wild world but instead in a book such as the one where it had all begun. He eventually took up a position teaching in Canterlot--one that was hard-earned, for not many have the patience for a stuttering professor--and spends much of his time there now, where he has rightfully earned his position as one of the university's most eccentric and most brilliant teachers.
This image is adorable, and I'm very fond of the character concept, as well. It sounds like it could belong to a character right out of the show!
All of these are so amazing! I love the idea of capturing the essence of a character with such simplicity, and you've taken the concept to all sorts of fun levels by displaying all kinds of personalities. (I also wish I could vector half as well as you do. Them smooth lines!)
