Lyman C. Juster

"These? Just some books. Given by The Giver of such things. I entertain myself with lavish myths of Figgs and Phantoms, and plan to stop by The Whizz Pop Chocolate Shop next time, provided I don't get lost and end up in The School for Good and Evil. Wait, how foolish of me, I'm there already."

-- Get used to Lyman's interesting speech pattern...Quick.

Lyman Charles Juster, who you may hear called The Bibilomane, is the son of the failed author turned...Well, failed criminal, The Bookworm.

Personality
A perfectionist to the very core, Lyman would never stop at 'good enough'. Everything is given the absolute, mathematically impossible one-hundred-ten percent. He'll lose sleep, he won't eat, and nothing will stand in his way until everything is precise and perfect. But in this is his downfall: Lyman has an awful habit of overthinking everything, considering too many alternate outcomes and possibilities, becoming a touch too analytic. Naturally, he isn't big on taking risks, then, afraid something may go horribly wrong and he'll end up worse for wear and...It's awful. This overthinking is present in his writing, where his stories will often halt to go on worldbuilding tangents and general explanations for every minute detail, making them a chore to slog through. Don't bother telling him that, since Lyman also simply cannot take criticism because ''well let's see you do better, then. ''But that's not even getting into, well, the most obvious thing--Books. Lyman is a diagnosed hyperlexic, and frequently surrounds himself with the company of many novels of varying lengths and genres. It doesn't matter what the book is about or the audience it's meant for, if it's a book, Lyman will read it. While his hyperlexia doesn't meddle in his speaking much--His social skills are, for the most part, okay--Some sort of echolalia seems to have settled in. Peppered in his speech are the titles of books he knows of or has read, only the title relating to the situation, with the actual content being completely disregarded. He also has a tendency to parrot back things, often going so far as to imitate accents and hand gestures, if that's how they said it before. Also probably due to his hyperlexia is his tendency not to interact with other students, preferring to keep his nose in a book.

Lyman is polite, insisting to refer to everyone as 'Mister / Miss [surname]', even if they lack a surname proper. He may appear offhanded and dismissive when replying, but he's an excellent listener and can answer anything even if he was completely invested in this next paragraph here. His reading speed isn't quite to the abnormal levels of his father, but it is rather speedy. Matters of copyright, however, are a bit more of a...Touchy matter. There's been...Issues. Many, many issues. If you've ever wondered why his father hasn't been seen in Gotham for a very long while, well, copyright's to blame and Lyman doesn't like that. Sure, the issues have been resolved, but the fact that there were issues at all is an imperfection that he should correct. Don't bring it up if you don't want a few books to your noggin. As long as you don't push Lyman's buttons or insult his writing, though, he's a generally okay boy. He's distant, he's a bit strange, and he keeps rattling off book titles for no particularly good reason, but he's nice enough and enjoys the rabble of other students around him.

Another thing: Fanfiction. Lyman doesn't look it, but he does enjoy looking at a good fanfic from time to time. Even better, he loves reading bad fanfiction. He sporks bad fanfics in his spare time and puts his sporkings up on the internet, because sometimes, bad fanfiction really needs to be seen to be believed.

Physical Description
Lyman is of decent height, Caucasian, and rather pasty. His hair is a very deep brown, and over his eyes are a pair of eyeglasses--However, they appear to be stuck in 'opaque nerd glasses' mode and make his eyes look like mere black ovals. He wears a long-sleeved dark green shirt with a sweatervest over it; mainly a dark grey with an argyle pattern in green and dark peach. His slacks are corduroy, brown, and his shoes are a dull reddish-brown in hue.

He always smells like mothballs, ink, and old leather. Nobody knows quite how this smell got etched into his being, but it did.

Family
Well, um...Er...Considering Lyman's frequent trips to the library, he sure sees his dad a lot. They acknowledge one another sometimes. Lyman is pretty protective of his father, considering the whole copyright thing, but...Er. Yeah, as you may be able to guess, their relationship is murky and based on sort of looking at one another and understanding what's going on. It seems to work well enough for them, but everyone makes the mistake of assuming they're not all too close at all. Which isn't the case. They just don't talk a lot.

Mrs. Juster? Previously an illustrator. A lovely woman. She meant very little to Bookworm, and thus, means very little to Lyman. Her fate is always vaguely stated, please don't bother asking, it won't get you very far. Just a dangling plot thread, we suppose.

Friends
Miss Richards and Mister Teller have insisted on forcing their company upon him. Charming. They're not horrible, he supposes, even if Mister Teller is always far to loud and Miss Richards always insists for his book reccomendations to be strictly British literature. He may be reluctant to be dragged into magic boxes or onto the sidecar of a Vespa, but no matter what happens, he still has loads of fun with them.

Pet
Lyman lacks a pet. I mean, if he forgets to eat sometimes, how would a pet fare in his care? Reading a guide isn't the same as owning one, silly.

Romance
Lyman has decided he's demisexual at best. Obviously, this reaches a natural hitch; namely, if he doesn't interact with people very much, how can he get close enough to form a romance, as demisexuality would imply? So maybe he's asexual. He doesn't care.

Trivia

 * Lyman's name is made up of authors--'Lyman' for Lyman Frank Baum (The Wonderful Wizard of Oz), 'Charles' for either Charles Dickens (Great Expectations, among many others) or Charles Dodgson (more famously Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland), and 'Juster' for Norton Juster (The Phantom Tollbooth). Additionally, his habit of incorporating book titles into his talk was heavily based on the titular character's way of speaking in the book Escape from Mr. Lemoncello's Library.
 * ...Also, the more Lissa stares at him, the more she realizes he looks a bit like Simon Petrikov. She didn't intend this.
 * In his original design, Lyman's glasses were a flat silver, but Lissa realized the ovals looked better. Also, his argyle sweatervest originally had the proper diagonal white stitching through the diamonds, but when it came time to draw that, Lissa just couldn't be bothered.
 * Amusingly, both The Bookworm and Batman: The Animated Series ' version of the Mad Hatter share an actor (Roddy McDowall). One must wonder how Philippa feels about this.
 * Similarly, The Bookworm got a brief cameo in Batman: The Brave and the Bold, despite copyright issues keeping him from being a villain proper. So both he and Mad Mod do technically exist in that canon, just in different ways.