• cigarettes (he just can't cope with the smell)
  
• long lectures or movies (unless they can be paused)
• high context culture or indirect individuals (if you mention that it's hot, he'll assume you mean "it's hot" and not "could you open the window?")
• overcrowded clubs/stadiums/etc. (he's seen too many videos of tramplings on youtube)

Timeline:

• 1982: Born to Mahi Bousaid (of Moroccan extraction) and Elanor Bousaid (née Bachman, California native) in Bakersfield. Both are of Geld ancestry but neither were ever active hunters.
• 1985: Mahi and Elanor begin to realize that their son is different -- obsessive and closed off -- though he's never officially diagnosed with anything. Based on this, they decide never to tell him about his ancestry.
  
• 1987: School reports disciplinary problems that are resolved by letting him read books of his choosing in class at certain points during the day.
• through 1996: Aside from occasional class disruptions, does fairly well in elementary and middle school. Encyclopedic knowledge of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and sport scores help him avoid any serious bullying.
• 1997: In typical Ari fashion, he decides to comb through the house and organize everything by importance and size. Finds his grandpa's old cricket balls from Morocco ("Cricket? What?") and spends the next month obsessively studying swing bowling. His parents know better than to try and dissuade him, simply hoping he'll forget his discovery in time.
• through 2000: High school is more challenging academically but he actually makes some leeway socially; a group of theater geeks adopt him out of interest and they remain friends throughout high school. He's able to ask them questions about things like the fine art of eye contact, and even if he can't always apply what he learns the answers are somehow more satisfactory that what he learns from his parents or counselors. He dates a few in the group in that wishy-washy "this month I will make out with YOU at lunch" high school way.
  
• 2000: Graduates from high school with a low C average. He can't finish an assignment to save his life, but tests well enough to avoid failing.
• through 2006: Works as a janitor, then as a short-order cook, then at a butcher shop, and then in data entry, all while taking community college courses and trying to figure out how to function like a successful student. 
  
• 2006: Finally develops study habits that work for him and begins accumulating credits.
• 2007: Attains the minimal amount of credits necessary for transfer to UC:SC, applies as a chemistry major, and is accepted.

--This Year (2008):
Summer: He moved out of his parents house and into an apartment near campus, quickly finding work as a bike courier (he did plenty of biking at home and was in good shape for it). He spent a few weeks tooling around the city and getting to know its roads before school started in August. Reluctant as he was to leave his family and friends, he knows he needs a degree of some sort because he can't make it through life on charisma or people skills.

Appearance:

• Hair - Ari has glossy black hair that forms big, loose tufts of curls around his head. He keeps it short (a few inches at most) and neatly trimmed, though it still manages to stick out at odd angles, with sideburns down to the bottom of his ears and some curls covering his forehead and framing his face. The more he uses his powers, the more streaks of silver and blue-gray will start appearing in his hair (in too random a pattern to be mistaken for premature graying).
• Eyes - He has wide, curious eyes, the right eye being brown and the left eye being blue with just a ring of brown at the iris. (OH NO YOU DIDN'T. Oh, but I did. In writing this app I discovered that different-colored eyes are unusually common among Moroccans of Berber ancestry, so damn it, I am going for it.) The right one will gradually lighten to a golden color, and the left one will become more blue-gray.
• Face - He has an oval-ish face with just a hint of a jawline, long and thick-but-neat eyebrows that seem perpetually raised in either wonder or confusion, and a slightly convex, slightly wide nose. His lips are a little on the plump side, usually fixed in a soft smile (because he found that people responded better to that than his usual deadpan stare, and he's not so good at conveying the right expression on a whim), and his skin is a medium olive color. He also wears glasses with thick lenses and black plastic frames.
• Build - Standing at 5'8", Ari is lean but lightly muscular, particularly in the legs as he spends all day zooming around on his bike. His posture can never be properly described as "relaxed"; when he's feeling passive or hesitant it's loose, with his shoulders drawn in a bit. In his usual "go go go" mode it's much stiffer and jerky. He fidgets with his bracelet often, and is also in the habit of reaching up and rubbing his neck.
• Clothes - Ari likes form-fitting tees with designs of the "Threadless© but not" variety (a robot and a penguin sitting together in a rowboat? outrageous!) and cargo shorts, with skater shoes and the lowest cut socks possible. He always has at least one beaded bracelet on his person, and occasionally a simple necklace as well.
• Voice - His voice is in the tenor range, and he tends to speak in a relatively monotonous tone. He also often finds himself speaking louder or softer than he ought to in any given situation. His speech occasionally cuts off at weird places as he has a tendency to get a little rambley, and he knows he needs to cut himself short sometimes; he's just not sure where.
  

Personality:
*Virtues: very bright, understands and tries to work around his own social limitations, almost impossible to anger, trusting of friends, forgiving
*Neutrals: has difficulty reading people/social cues, skeptical, eager to please, loves being around people, very energetic
*Vices: inability to focus on assigned tasks, wary of strangers, too willing to accept blame, obsessive

Blurb: Ari is, first of all, pretty intelligent. He has a great head for math and has no trouble recalling facts and figures, although his visual memory isn't so great; he's the guy that will remember someone's name but not their face instead of the other way around. What he lacks is focus.

Well, that not might be entirely correct. He is actually an obsessive focusing machine; if he wants to memorize the lyrics to all of Devo's songs then he will do it and have it done by tomorrow. He's just not so good at switching focus when he needs to be concentrating on something else, like school, and he can't really choose what he ends up obsessing over. He finally got around this by studying in half-hour chunks interspersed with bike rides to release all the nervous energy he built up, which means he never waits until Sunday night to do his homework. He's developed other coping mechanisms for the lecture part of the learning experience, but he's still a serial pen-tapper. Fortunately for his professors, he only needs to be told once to stop tapping his pen (though he may start tapping his foot instead, because no one said anything about that).

So Ari does tend to take things very literally; he has great difficulty identifying the nuance in words or in body language. He understands some of it in theory, but there is a huge gap between understanding, say, that some people express affection through physical contact and understanding how and when it's appropriate. After a few very awkward hugs in high school he learned enough to know that he should just stop attempting it altogether. The thing is he loves people and loves being around people, even if he doesn't always know what they expect of him. He is very eager to please and very worried about offending. If someone asks him to do something, he'll probably do it unless it's very clearly against his best interests ("help me kill my roommate" is clearly a no go but "don't tell my roommate I threw up on his bed" is okay). He's also afraid of boring other people, which is why he started doing things like beatboxing and dancing. It made his friends laugh, and he was unconcerned about the subtlety of whether they were laughing with or at him (though for the record, it was "with").

He's usually very fidgety and full of energy, but when he's confronted with new or complex social situations he becomes very hesitant and passive. He likes to watch and listen and take in as much information as he can, because on some level the poor dear still believes that eventually something will click and he'll just get it. He's not prone to depression or self-pity, but when they do rear their ugly twin heads it's probably because he's thinking about the fact that no, he never will get it. Anger is likewise a rare experience for him, usually because he assumes that if something goes wrong in any given social situation it's probably his fault for missing something. It's also hard to rile him; "I fucked your mom last night!" is more likely to produce "I find that very unlikely given the circumstances" than anger. For similar reasons he's also very forgiving.

His biggest challenge now is working and living in a new town without the benefit of his support system. What makes this even more difficult is the fact that he's been seeing... well, things he really can't explain. Ari's a natural skeptic; he likes hard science because it's a world that's not closed to him the way something like literary analysis is, and he puts a great deal of stock in it. The idea of the supernatural scares him, in part because science is the one area in his life where events are consistent and meaningful, and in part because he's read about his condition (never being officially diagnosed is no problem in the age of the interwebs) and understands very well what "increased likelyhood of co-morbidity" means; he's terrified that he may be schizophrenic on top of everything else. He's afraid to tell his parents or friends back home about it because he wants so very badly to be able to do this on his own without worrying them. What he needs is friends in Sunset City, but he's not sure how to go about obtaining them or who he can trust. His old friends were pretty protective of him; it was through them that he made new friends, and they were also good about leading him away from people who might take advantage of him. Now that they're not around, he doesn't have a sure way of telling whether the people talking to him about Daemons are screwing with him or not.

Or, as Angie so eloquently put it, "Ari is really trying to be a functioning, valued adult with friends and roots and a place. He just lost his operating manual and the replacement is in a rare dialect of Hindi."

Elemental Control: Air: Turbulence

Abilities: Ari's element is one of very fine, in fact microscopic, detail. Turbulence is not expansive in the way that currents are. Though the effects of it may spread for miles, it all starts when individual particles are disturbed and break away from the laminar flow of their neighbors, and that is primarily what Ari deals with.

Tracking - Daemons and other supernatural entities tend to create turbulence with the otherworldly energy they give off, sending nearly imperceptible whorls and eddies out through the air. Ari can track these disturbances for miles (or will be able to, once he knows what he's looking for). The same goes for seals, though the turbulence they create is much more delicate and harder to differentiate from ordinary atmospheric disturbances.

Sensing Hunters - What applies to Daemons applies to Hunters as well. What's unique about hunters is that they tend to create turbulence in individually consistent patterns (in cross rolls or zigzags or knots), a strange sort of order in the chaos. The patterns are like fingerprints, each one unique.

Dispersing Energy - Turbulence creates drag. Turbulence is also why explosions may send out more energy in one direction than another. As such, Ari can use his powers do disperse energy attacks -- only small ones at first, and only instinctually, but it will develop into a useful defensive tactic, and in time he might even be able to redirect attacks by erasing the turbulence at just the right angle.

Physical Manifestation - Ari is ambidextrous, and has been as far back as he can remember. The reasoning here is that turbulence is caused by individual molecules in a fluid wandering off in their own direction, completely independent of each other, creating whorls and eddies. His left and right hands don't need to know what the other is doing. He can draw a near-perfect circle with one hand while simultaneously drawing a square with the other (have you ever tried it? it is SO HARD! "It was part of the aptitude test given to ancient Chinese scholars applying to a government office." -Ari). As time goes on his overall dexterity will increase, but he is ambidextrous now because the discovery of that ability would be the most boring log ever. Here it is: "I can write with both hands now." The end.

He's also one of those people it's impossible to sneak up on, since he's able to detect tiny disturbances in the air (though he has no idea why or how he knows). If you sneeze on the other side of campus, he'll know. He can also invariably pinpoint who "dealt it", so don't pretend it was the dog.

Being the detail fiend he is, he ought to make a good uber-tracker some day, though he is not as of yet a Sherlock Holmes-esque footprint reader.

Type of Hunter: Ranger ("We live for The One, we die for The One.")

Relic: A set of three cricket balls (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2qCc7hinHQ&NR=1 :D). He doesn't know they belonged to his grandfather; he just likes to juggle with them. Eventually it might be good for him to have a ranged weapon that he doesn't have to chuck at the enemy (even an atlatl would be a step up from cricket balls).

Band: It is a mystery! Fortress? Gumbies? Will he and the other bandless start their own band? "You know what would be a good name for a band? 'Jimmy Carter Rabbit Attack'. Or 'Aggressive Metal Bees'."