shannon edman info and backstory

[manannan]

quick facts:

* 26 years old
* Born in Canada, has dual US citizenship (accent reads as west coast, PNW)
* 6'4" tall, blond hair and blue eyes, always tanned
* Bulky and well-built thanks to highly active life
* Outwardly very friendly with "gentle giant" energy
* Also mild himbo energy
* Bi bi bi but into havin' sex, not makin' love and here for a good time, not a long time
* Is completely honest and up-front about the above so he's not a total jackass
* Professional scuba diving instructor that leapfrogs from one tourist location to the next as work opens up
* Worships the ocean very literally - he has certain ancient deities and deep-sea civilizations he does believe in, but has patchworked them together into his own unique system of beliefs
* May actually be a link between deep-sea gods/demigods and humanity??




Childhood

- Shan was an only child of parents who were killed when a tornado tore through their home, while Shan himself was away visiting a friend. He was eight years old
- He was adopted by an aunt and uncle and moved from Saskatchwean, in the Canadian prairies, to Vancouver Island on the west coast
- Aunt and uncle run a foster home so he was constantly surrounded by other children and teens with some form of troubled past or family tragedy
- Got along well with most kids but the oppositional types often tried to antagonize him, which made him nervous because he was already much bigger than them and feared that he might be sent away if he harmed anyone (he didn't entirely understand the difference between his place in the household and theirs)
- This was how he developed the ability to keep his cool no matter what came at him and use his size as an implicit threat instead of fighting
- He only became gentler as he got older which made it difficult for him to relate to masculinity-obsessed fellow teen boys, but again, he coasted on his size and looks and was able to maintain mild popularity
- After graduation, he tried to pursue the necessary education for a career in marine sciences but flunked out repeatedly. Finally, he gave up and obtained any and all deep diving certification he didn't yet have, then got accredited as an instructor
- Now travels the world taking instructor jobs at resorts, on cruise ships, etc

Personal passion

Shan fell in love with the ocean the instant he clapped eyes on it. Every free moment of his childhood was spent beachcombing, swimming, snorkeling, and then cave diving and rock climbing to seek out isolated patches of water and, finally, scuba diving once he was old enough. His passion never exactly resolved itself into any particular sport or organized hobby, so it tended to isolate him to a certain degree when people didn't understand the reason and depth of his love.

The truth is that Shan can feel a unique kind of life within the ocean, a consciousness or entity that has nothing to do with the creatures known to humankind (though he loves them as well.) He feels it so strongly that he's come to believe in ocean deities and hidden deep sea civilizations made up of beings greater than any known life forms. His life since moving to Vancouver Island has been dedicated to piecing together his belief system by seeking out information about those archaic sea gods and mythical underwater worlds, as well as personally experiencing as much of the planet's oceans as he can to build on his instinctual knowledge.

The latter is preferable to him, since he's still not much of an academic.

His findings, beliefs, theories, etc take the form of several scrapbooks full of collages and artwork, most of which make no sense to anyone but him.



Career and social life

Shan is a professional diving instructor who takes temporary jobs with any resorts/etc that offer free live-in board and cover some other living expenses such as meals, thereby saving his earnings for personal interest diving trips in between contracts. It means he has no fixed address and no long-term savings but he's fine with that and travels very lightly to make it work.

This lifestyle also means he has an enormous online network of friends he's met along the way, but no long-term and meaningful connections, either platonic or romantic. He seldom goes back to visit with any of those people and prefers casual sex to dating so that he won't be forced to make promises he knows he won't keep. While living this way isn't a constant angst-generating struggle for him or anything, it does lead to a certain pervasive loneliness that he mostly brushes off as inevitable no matter what life he had chosen for himself, given that he's always struggled to connect with and relate to other people anyway.