Glenn Traupel

[Glenn Traupel]

The Basics

Name: Glenn Jeremiah Traupel
Nicknames: Glenn Solo (Orlando)
Age: 45 (December 10th 1973)
Pronouns: He/Him
Orientation: Bisexual
Desired Rank/Job: Math Teacher
Powers: Empathy - Glenn can feel the emotions of other people around him. all the other people around him in a 200 square foot area unless that person is a psychic with particularly good mental shielding. Because of this he finds group settings to be a bit overwhelming, and prefers to spend time with people on a one on one basis, or in very small groups. He honestly doesn't know how his sister manages with her giant family.

He's capable of mental shielding himself, which allows him to tolerate group settings but he can't keep up his shields for longer than about an hour before migraines set in.

If he tries, he can focus on the emotions of an individual and burrow down through complicated mixtures of feelings. This is extremely draining, however, and he hates to do it.

He can also share his emotional state with other people, which he primarily does to calm people who are nervous. If he's in a particularly bad state, however, he can cause everyone around him to break down with him.
Play By: Paul Rudd

The Details

Hair Color: Brown
Eye Color: Green
Height: 5'9

Any Piercings? none
Any Tattoos? none
Any Scars?
General Appearance: Glenn doesn’t think of himself as someone who stands out. He hovers just below the average height for an adult American male, with dark hair that he maintains in an unremarkable short hairstyle. He's usually seen with faint stubble rather than a fully clean shaven face, but never with a full beard. He can't stand the way beards feel, but his facial hair tends to grow fast enough that keeping entirely smooth is a challenge. He's fair skinned, the kind of pale that never really turns very dark in the sun but instead is prone to burning even when he's trying his best to avoid that outcome. 

He’s normally seen with a pleasant smile regardless of any inner turmoil he might be experiencing. His eyes are the feature he considers his best, because green is interesting and unique.

Because he works at a school he’s often found in dress slacks and white collar shirts. Ties are a rarity, but not entirely unheard of. He doesn’t hate them the way some people do but he finds that wearing them too often intimidates some portion of his students. The majority of his wardrobe is dominated by neutral colors, with the occasional accent tie. During the late spring and the summer he's a little more colorful, not infrequently seen wearing button ups with fun patterns: Floral or tropical or interesting stripes. In the winter he becomes much less colorful with the exception of a single Hanukkah sweatshirt. Most of his clothes are off the rack from Target or Old Navy, and that doesn't bother him a bit. On the weekends he wears jeans, graphic tees, and a pair of canvas Nikes that he replaces about once a year. 

Personality:  First impressions would be that Glenn is a blindingly positive person. He's rarely seen without a smile, even at the worst of times. If there's a problem he's the first to put a positive spin on it, and the first person to reassure others when needed. He's willing to be both an evening of laughter and a shoulder to cry on, although in both cases he'll have to spend the next day holed away to recover.

What he's not good at is reciprocating this emotional sharing. He doesn't allow people to know what he's feeling except by power slip up, which are rare now that he's nearing fifty. Of course, he doesn't want people to realize that he's keeping them at arm's length, and so his strategy is to use humor and jokes to make it appear as if he's sharing more than he really is.

Beneath the sunshiney surface is a man threatened to be swallowed whole by both his emotions and those of other people. Even relatively stable control over his powers hasn't made them easy to cope with. He's developed methods of maintaining stability, but this is more defense than offense. He no longer remembers what it is to be oblivious to the onslaught of emotions surrounding him.

The buoyancy with which he greets life has given him some popularity among the students at Hammel. He has no regrets about not having children of his own, though; the intensity of emotions within families, both affection and bickering, exhausts him even to consider.

Your Vices

Likes: 
+ Soft pretzels with cheese 
+ Jelly donuts 
+ Psychedelic rock 
+ Children 
+ Puppets
Dislikes: 
- Emotional intimacy 
- Wearing pants at home
- Cooking 
- FaceBook
- Dallas Cowboys 
Strengths: 
+ Entertaining children
+ Goofball  
+ Can make a mean paper airplane 
+ Math 
+ Deflecting 
Weaknesses: 
- Maintaining close relationships outside of Ezra and Orlando
- Unambitious 
- Poor direct communication
- Sunburns easily 
- Can't function in crowds

Family Ties

Father: Scott Edward Traupel (b. 1948, non-powered)
Mother: Deborah Judith Traupel (b. 1950, dream walking/manipulation)
Siblings: Brad Jonathon Traupel  (b. 1973 - January, non powered), Heather Tamara Maylinger (b. 1976, Hammel Alumni), Frank Adam Traupel (b. 1975, non-powered)
Any Other Important People: Daniel Maylinger (Brother in law | Hammel Alumni | b. 1976), Aidan Maylinger (nephew | 13 | Hammel student), Taylor Maylinger ( Niece | Hammel student | 15), Courtney Maylinger (Niece | Hammel student | 18)
BFFs since Hammel: Orlando Pareja and Ezra Keeti 

History

Glenn Traupel was born and raised in Philly to Deborah and Scott Traupel. Deborah had the ability to dream walk and to manipulate the contents of dreams, which meant that she lost a lot of sleep trying to keep nightmares from terrorizing her children. Scott was baseline, and worked for the city Water Department as General Manager of Planning and Engineering. Although they didn't understand the inner workings of the water department Scott was sure to instill in his children a sense of how important government work of this nature was.

Glenn was the second child of four (Brad, Glenn, Frank, and Heather), which made for a rather loud and boisterous home life. He enjoyed their company well enough, even if occasionally there was antagonism, sometimes provoked deliberately by his own behavior. They were impossibly close in age, his mother having been pregnant back to back for essentially four years. This made for a certain amount of intimacy between them, particularly between the boys, as they had to fend for themselves a bit more than they might otherwise have during each pregnancy and the subsequent newborn phase, whereas Heather, as the last of them, got to be the baby for longer.

When Glenn was in elementary school his mother entered the workforce as a cashier at Macy's. Their father made decent enough money, but economically it was becoming more difficult for the middle class to maintain their lifestyle on a single income. Cashier work paid very little, but it was just enough to help stretch the Traupel finances out a little more than they might otherwise have.

Brad's 12th birthday came and went, and he remained baseline. Glenn thought that he was going to follow in his older brother's footsteps, but during Brad's Bar Mitzvah he found himself overwhelmed by a flood of conflicting emotions, from excitement to nerves to jealousy. He caused an embarrassing scene, collapsing during the Torah reading, something it took Brad nearly the entirety of junior high to forgive him for.

He was sent off to Hammel at once, and despite the powers training Glenn struggled. Junior high was a challenging time for most people, and he had the ability to feel the heightened emotions of his peers. It was overwhelming to be struck with someone else's depression, or the butterfly's in someone else's stomach when they saw their crush. Pep rallies and sports games were nearly impossible for him to attend, not when there was more focus to the emotions around him, all the excitement and anticipation and rivalries washing over him more strongly with not only crowds of people but crowds of people mostly honing in on the same feelings.

He gradually was able to learn control over his powers, but his mental shielding was never very strong despite his trainer's best attempts at improving them. As his control grew his grades, which had slipped with his manifestation, began to improve once again. Math and physical science were his best classes, primarily thanks to his father's summer study assistance rather than any sort of innate skills there himself.

While at Hammel he met Ezra Keeti, who was, in his opinion, really charismatic. Possibly also adorable. He refused to acknowledge that this might be a crush, because that would be awkward not only because acknowledging it might ruin their friendship, but he wasn't completely comfortable with the idea that he might be bisexual. He didn't know how to tell anyone, or even whether or not he should. He didn't quite realize that he was still having enough power slip ups that people around him knew, because he had displaced his own amorous feelings onto them at times.

He and Ezra also befriended Orlando Pareja and his girlfriend Valentina. Somehow he found himself remaining in their orbit, being a part of a friend group despite his normal habit of self-sabotage when he found himself becoming close to people. Perhaps it was his crush on Ezra, or perhaps it was Ezra's natural charm that kept them together. Or perhaps he was simply lonely enough to overcome those tendencies, if only for the group that would become his closest friends.


After graduation he attended University of California-Berkeley, on the other side of the country from the rest of his family in part to escape the anxiety he felt at dealing with what he thought were their expectations versus reality and in part because both Ezra and Orlando had applied and been accepted as well. He found his first year a bit overwhelming, but after becoming involved in various student activities he found his bearings. He declared a major in Civil Engineering more out of loyalty to his father than any particular interest, which frustrated a few classmates who didn't make it into the program and knew he wasn't fully committed in the same way.

Once he graduated from Berkeley he was able to get a job with FERC's San Francisco's Regional office in the Division of Dam Safety and Inspections but he didn't last long. He found himself frustrated and bored, and when Orlando and Valentina announced their intentions to move back to Pilot Ridge to work for Hammel he put in an application for the school. He had to complete 13 weeks of student teacher training to become a fully licensed teacher in Vermont, and to complete a summer teaching course, but once he'd done so he was prepared to teach math to young meta-humans.

Eventually his crush on Ezra faded, although his attraction never quite did, which sometimes makes life awkward when the younger man's power calls attention to his amorous moods. At first this conflicted with Glenn's empathy in ways that were uncomfortable for everyone caught in the crossfire, but now he's able to manage this a bit better.

He's grateful for their friendship, which has stayed strong all these decades later. Every year they go off on a road trip, just the two of them. Never a full week, but enough to reforge their bond away from the rest of the commune, and where Glenn can focus his empathy solely on what Ezra is feeling, which allows him to feel close in a way he can't seem to manage with anyone else.


He's had a few lovers over the years, primarily women, sometimes men, occasionally people with different gender identities. Nobody has managed to stick; he knows this is his own fault, because he starts to push people away when they get too near and that's hard. He can barely cope with other people's emotions as it is, but when he's dating them it becomes much more complicated.


For the last couple of years he's had a roommate, someone who, mercifully, is another psychic, and has much stronger and more natural mental shielding. Without the empathy to complicate matters he far prefers having other people around, and so he enjoys having another person in the house. There's not the remotest chance of romance, either, which is in all honesty a bit of a relief to him. That means he doesn't have to worry about prioritizing their emotions in the way he feels is necessary with lovers.

What About You?

Name: Oreo
Age: crone
Experience: two decades 
How Did You Find Us? I was born here
Ready To Play? yeah sure