M: Emma Fraiser, Civilian
emma fraiser
GENRE: Futuristic political dystopia.
ARCHETYPE: Nancy Drew.
REPRESENTATIVE JOURNAL ENTRIES: ONE
REPRESENTATIVE ROLEPLAY LOGS: Forthcoming!
PERSPECTIVE ESSAYS: Forthcoming!
NAME: Emma Margaret Fraiser
DATE OF BIRTH, AGE: 14 April 2050; 24 as of 4 April 2075.
AFFILIATIONS: Shusai Corporation, Mr. Nero Lawson
PROFESSION: Secretary for the detective agency of one Mr. Nero Lawson, but goodness if she doesn't like to help more than is needed sometimes! In non-Emma speak, that would be to say that she is not only the taker of his notes, but also the brewer of his coffee, the culinary mastermind behind his three meals every day, the launderer of his clothing, and... well, his caretaker in general. Emma is often more busy dusting the office and sewing him new and more fashionable draperies to make up for the awful moth-eaten ones than actually doing anything that resembles filing during the day, but she usually ends up staying overtime to make up for it. It's her job to make sure things look ship-shape for Mr. Lawson and his clientèle, inside and out, or her name is Miss Emma M. Fraiser! Another thing she does, albeit in a less "official" capacity, is serve as something of a sounding board to Nero should he need it; although Emma would never fancy herself a partner proper, it's only part of her over-eager nature to do anything in order to ensure her employer's success.
PERSONALITY: Less gracious people would say that Emma Fraiser is "a ray of fucking sunshine." She, of course, prefers to describe herself as "peppy" (or perhaps "energetic," if being particularly demure), but the fact of the matter is that it is a rare moment when Emma looks to be anything less than utterly thrilled to be doing whatever it is that she's doing. Whether it's greeting a new client the detective agency or preparing to clean her apartment, Emma always manages to undertake any task given to her with a spring in her step and a smile on her face. Her social life certainly shows the same sort of zeal; as Nero is quite capable of attesting to, it's rare to see her without an ear-to-ear grin or for her talk to reach anything slower than the most excited of cadences. "Enthusiastic" is a good word for her general manner -- and so, too, is "overwhelming." Although ultimately well-meaning, Emma's biting-at-the-bit tendencies have the habit of getting on even the most patient of nerves quickly; could she be any ditsier, for instance? Does she ever stop smiling? Does she even fucking mean anything she says? I mean, the woman just shrieked in excitement over hemming a pant leg -- really?
Although, to be honest, Emma probably did shriek with joy over the idea of mending, for she fancies herself something of a domestic goddess in the making. If she were privy to the present day and its Martha Stewart Revolution, Emma would've been a general on the War For Folded Napkins and Outrageously Elaborate Crafts for the Home; as it is now, she's thrilled to be doing any and all mending, cooking, cleaning, fussing, and extreme organizational tactics asked of her. Her glee stems from equal parts genuine job satisfaction, desire to fulfill the ultimate role of wife and mother, and the deep and honest happiness that comes from her helping others. She doesn't micromanage because others can't do it as well as she can (although, it must be said that if Emma is nothing else, she is terribly skilled at her present job) so much as from an authentic desire to ensure another person's success by handling all of the middling shit that they can't be bothered with at the moment. For Nero, this ranges from making him coffee in the morning to peer pressuring persuading him to eat all his vegetables before she leaves the office for the night. Sure, this might mean that she ends up being a little more intrusive than she should be, but Emma always insists that it's for one's greater good and that really, honestly, you'll thank her later. At least her pressuring isn't in the form of incessant nagging (unless it's over Nero and Brussels sprouts; in that case, all deals are off) -- rather, as with all things, Emma gets her work done with lots of smiles and "pretty please"s. As Emma would say, you certainly can't attract flies with vinegar, since they like honey so much better. It's something of a personal philosophy.
You can't deny that Emma has a pretty healthy level of job satisfaction; being Nero Lawson's secretary, whether he knows it or not, is something of a full-time job, but it's still not Emma's ultimate goal -- motherhood. She gets a lot of the same benefits from being Mr. Lawson's employee, sure, but ultimately she's playing for the house in the suburbs and the baby on her hip, and it would be a lie to say that a part of her doesn't try to play the part accordingly. Shusai's done well with teaching her what she should be versus what she shouldn't, and so there's a certain amount of her vapid bubbliness that isn't authentic. If there is one thing she doesn't like, it's her inexplicable need to start nosing into Lawson's cases unannounced. It's not that he minds (or else she probably would've been fired months ago), but it betrays in her both a fear that her nosiness may be the seed of her current status as an old maid and a niggling desire to do more than iron and cook dinner. She's always liked the little logic puzzles in life, and she's certainly good at occasionally finding the tiniest key to the answer of the puzzle, which shows that Emma's mind is a lot sharper than she'd like you to believe -- but one mention that she may have a hint of intelligence, and she gets brighter than a Roman candle on the Fourth of July. Most of the embarrassment is rooted in the fact that she's obviously been showing the most unladylike tendencies if one were to be commenting on something she did as clever, but another part of it is genuine humility -- especially when it comes to anything involving work talk and Mr. Lawson.
Actually, speaking of Lawson (which, when it comes to Emma at the current moment, seems to happen with greater and greater frequency), he's a pretty brilliant example of Emma's unflagging faith and optimism in those around her and the human race in general. She knows he's a man two years out of a Shusai prison, but rather than discredit him based on the verdict of the state, Emma has and will continue to cry foul on the very findings that the system that she apparently buys so heavily into manufactured. Well, not that Emma has ever really said whether she's for or against Shusai, but this is as much of a "not women's talk" cop-out as it is the fact that Emma actually believes in the situations of individual people than a conglomeration as a whole. She'll insist that she's seen Mr. Lawson work and knows him to be a fair, honest man with a nose for justice rather than a man whose mind has been corrupted by the lethal poison of terrorism, and unless he were to go on to commit the most drastic of character changes, Emma would stand by this belief until she dies. She's dogged in the insistence that she should never judge a person harshly until proven otherwise, and it's a tenant that she sticks to, however foolhardy as it may end up being in the end for her. About the only time it's suspended is when she's nosing about on cases, and then, Emma looks at the situation not unlike how others look at the words on a crossword page. Even then, she has a general attitude of "all are innocent until proven guilty" about the entire matter.
Of course, unfaltering faith in the people has managed to get Emma into more scrapes than she can manage. It's her naivete that's repeatedly cost her jobs, but the misadventures leading to those pink slips have given Emma a stronger set of coping mechanisms than one might originally suspect. Habitual self-sacrifice in the name of family and work, combined with a handy habit of learning to stifle any opinion on a given subject before it could ever leave her, means that Emma's built up a surprisingly impressive stiff upper lip. You'd think that she'd be the sort to scream and faint away at blood, but enough jobs at shady private eye agencies of varying degrees and plain old living in that old neighborhood of hers has conditioned Emma nicely; she's more often able to smile away a mangled body than she is to faint, and it's because of the fact that she knows that losing her head from such things isn't going to help much that secures this result. In this sense, it's hard for Emma to lose her cool -- she's no fainter, and if it came to a situation wherein there was a shoot-off and Nero was on the ground bleeding, Emma would be able to pick up the gun and proffer protection, albeit in weak and wavering form. Yet in turn, Emma's tendency for self-sacrifice often means that she's severely lacking in a good old-fashioned self-preservation instinct, which means that although Emma is quite capable of taking care of herself, she has this awful lack of being able to tell when she should cease and desist. As a result, Emma is as much the damsel in distress as she is the proverbial knight, although she would hardly be the one to put it in such romantic light.
LIKES: Forthcoming!
DISLIKES: Forthcoming!
HISTORY: Zacharias Fraiser wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed, but Marianne Fife didn't mind -- he was a pleasant boy, a good shoulder to lean on, and incredibly good-looking when cleaned up and presented at school dances. She'd started going steady with him after helping him with math homework her freshman year of high school; in return for making sure that Fraiser'd stay on the football team, the school gave Marianne a bit of a discount on books. It was a win-win situation for everyone that was made all the sweeter when the two found out they liked kissing each other behind the bleachers, and the two had been more or less inseparable ever since. Marianne was usually the guiding compass and Zacharias the hand to hold whenever she went through one of her tumultuous moods of hers, but neither of their brighter qualities shone in the brilliant after-prom decision of fooling around in some hotel after the dance was done. The summer before her senior year and Marianne was to be a mother -- well, the Fifes were fit to be tied if their daughter wasn't to be married on the spot, and the Fraisers were about to explode for all the indignance that they held for their son getting some poor little brat knocked up. There were hushed ceremonies and the general sentiment of "Pony up and get a job for the house and the new arrival." Still, after it was all said and done, the newlyweds were pretty pleased; after all, they figured they were just going to go and get married anyway -- just so happened that it was a few years before either of them had planned it.
As such, Emma Fraiser's early childhood was pretty happy considering the circumstances. Sure, there was that stretch of time when Marianne was a little "down" after the baby, but they had disproven post-partum depression -- right? Her father doted and her mother taught her about making cupcakes and rolls for her daddy to eat when he came home. They were a young family, sure, and maybe not the richest, but they got along happily and that was what mattered. Emma's mama had always been moody, sure, but the first time she really remembers one of her fits was right after Mary Lou was born. She was five and her mother would lie in bed for hours until the baby would cry for milk. Emma'd carry her in and nestle her to her mother, who would smile and lighten up enough to move to nurse the child. It seemed as if the gentle urging helped, and so it was a formula that stuck. Mama's sad? Nudge her a bit until she gets better. It was a formula that carried her throughout the rest of the Fraiser pregnancies and the entirety of Emma's childhood, with varying degrees of success.
At first, the Fraisers were sure that Emma was going to love school -- and Emma was too, for that matter. It was quite evident early on that Emma had inherited her mama's love for books and logic, and her parents had nothing but glowing praises as to what the Shusai school system could do for her. An well-rounded and educated young lady would a good wife someday make they would often coo, frequently in the hope that she wouldn't be making certain mistakes that they had, and so Emma went off to her first day of school with a bubbling front and came back with two scraped knees and a face full of tears. Even for the jubilant kindergartener, Emma was too enthusiastic; her excitement at writing the letter "a" was enough to send the kids at her table into fits of giggles, and who actually got that excited when counting on the number line? Emma soon found answering questions disheartening and learned to channel her energies into other things, such as bright and happy crayon pictures and playing at excellent sessions of House. Her specialties at play time translated into high school emphasis on home economics and trying not to get too excited while reading Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in English Literature. This was made somewhat difficult by the way she squeaked as they read through "A Scandal in Bohemia," but otherwise she did pretty well. By the time she graduated, everyone had pretty much forgotten that she was crazy for letters and figuring out puzzles. Her in-your-face happy, though? ... not so much. It certainly explains that "never been kissed" air about her at the reception following baccalaureate, anyway.
Of course, and then there was taking care of her mother that made husband hunting a little distracting. Arnold's birth triggered a particularly vicious bout of Marianne's depression -- enough so that even "Come on, mama, the baby's hungry!" to get her out of the stupor. One clinic check later and the mother Fraiser was diagnosed with chronic depression. It was the end of an era for Emma, of course, and not just in the sense that she found out that her mother wasn't infallible, either. Her father's paycheck hardly was able to pay for four children, but with the addition of medication and everything started to go downhill from there. By the time she was eighteen, there was no real hope for Emma to be going around to debutante balls and cotillions with her fresher-faced friends; it was either work or let the family flounder. Emma'd be horrified to admit this, but a little bit of her resented her mother the first day she stepped into her first of many secretarial jobs. She was good at the organizing, sure, but the coping with the sexual harassment? She was a lady, for goodness' sakes! But still, it kept food on the Fraisers' table and her mother in a dreamy placidity. Emma persevered.
Of course, by "persevere," this mostly meant that Emma managed to keep a paycheck -- it just so happened that the hands of the people signing that money away changed with alarming frequency over the years. You'd think that the first seven times she was groped in the work place and Emma would've sucked it up and dealt with it, but she was nothing if not determined to be treated like a lady. However, the longer her list of former superiors became, the more difficult it was for her to find work in offices that would accept a headstrong (if not cheerful and very obedient otherwise) girl who should've just accepted that she was a piece of meat working woman in the first place. Only after the last time she quit did Emma realize that she didn't have any more filing leads -- and it goes without saying that her family needed the money quick. She had one interview at the Copa Cabana and almost was called back up when she read an advertisement for a good secretary needed at the office of Nero Lawson. It was the sort of serendipity that she had been praying for every night. Sure, the address was seedy, but if it meant not having to become a dancer? Well, let it never be said that Emma Fraiser backed down from a challenge.
Emma still wonders if she would've been chosen for the job if not for the mortuary trip. There were a lot of nice, qualified ladies at the interview, if not somewhat old and smelling of cat pee, and once Emma saw the terribly, doggedly serious look that was always on Mr. Lawson's face, she was pretty sure that he was going to pack her up and send her out quicker than you could say "goodness gracious!" But he did ask for a second interview, wherein they went in to check up on a victim from the morgue as he was being embalmed. Later, it was recounted that it was truly impressive how Emma didn't bat an eye at the actual body -- the poor dear was rather mangled, after all -- but Emma always insisted that it wouldn't have been professional or polite to talk about how awful that gangrene around the neck wound looked! And the rest, as they say, is history.
Of course, the early days of their partnership was quiet, sure, but Emma didn't mind; Mr. Lawson, whether he realized it or not, had saved her from a fate worse than death, and she was ever-so determined to make it up to him! Besides, he was such a gentleman; three weeks in, and he hadn't touched her at all! It was, in Emma's experience, a new record. And then there was his sadness; although nothing altogether on par with her mother, of course, but Emma's heartstrings were pulled nonetheless. She'd start trying to make him eat bagels while reviewing case files, at first, and then maybe offer to hem a pair of pants for him a week later. Months after the first insistence that he eat a banana and Lawson and Emma have become something of a team rather than an employer versus employee -- although Emma insists that he makes all the important decisions! (Well. Except for the one about Brussels sprouts. That one, he can never make.) Emma, on her part, is pretty sure she's never been more tickled pink at being a working girl before. Sure, they might do shady things, but Mr. Lawson's so awfully nice and where would he be if she couldn't find his second best pair of dress shoes in the closet? Nowhere at all, and Emma Fraiser isn't quite sure if she could dare abide the very idea.
GAME(S) PLAYED: "fiddlesticks" at The MAIMED PROJECT at Insanejournal.
STATUS: Active
PLAYED-BY: Jacinda Barrett