Post by Amber Joy on Jan 5, 2014 22:19:32 GMT -6
Amber Joy
Age: 23
Gender: Female
Orientation: Homosexual
Profession: Researcher
Occupation: ...Working on it.
Appearance: Amber is from the Joy line, the bloodline of pink-haired women that could seem identical to those who passed them by, in appearance, voice, and even how they carried themselves. One in every city. With the old world gone, and with it many of the old pressures for Joys to be Joys, Amber still looks very similar to what you would see in those pictures of old world Joys, though not exact.
For one, Amber is pretty tall, standing at one hundred and seventy-three centimeters (just barely over five feet, eight inches) with a willowy figure. Her hair, bleached by the sun, is a pale pastel pink rather than the usual more vibrant shade, and is generally tied into a long, single braid that hangs to her mid-back rather than put up in such 'silly,' as she'd put it, hair loops. Her skin is generally tanned from physical labor, the same labor that has left nigh-unnoticeable lean muscles on her slender frame; Amber is stronger than she looks, though her physical prowess is more geared toward speed, agility, and endurance than brute strength.
The last thing that sets her apart is that, on her otherwise dead-ringer-for-an-old-world-Joy face, she has a pair of pale, icy blue eyes that are just light enough a shade to blend slightly with her eye whites and give her an intense, and some would say creepy, stare.
Everyday Clothes: Amber dresses like a cowgirl, for the most part. Those old jeans she likes to wear, which had belonged to her mother and older sister before passed on to her, have certainly seen better days, the blue colour faded in numerous places with outright tears in the knees, not to mention her lack of figure and greater height in comparison to the jeans' previous owners means that they've been obviously tailored around the hips, and she tends to tuck her pant legs into her boots to hide the fact that her legs are a bit too long for them.
Her shirts, all of them with short or no sleeves, are generally cheap linen, a plain pale tan shade rather than the kind of bright colours one could get from dyeing the fabric, and her boots are equally simple and made of leather. She has a pair of fingerless gloves, also made of simple, unadorned leather, that she's very fond of wearing.
Her most prized possession, however, is her cowgirl hat. It's jet black, and belonged to her father before being passed onto her when she was seventeen. It's a bit beaten up, but she loves it and wears it everywhere; she gets a kick out of tipping it whenever she says hello.
Formal Garbs: None. She's not terribly interested in owning any, either.
Pack: Amber, when possible, stuffs all of her belongings in a backpack. It primarily blue and grey in colour, a bit old and beat up with a couple of patches sown into it, but it gets the job done.
Personality: Amber, in a nutshell, is a tough ranch girl with a soft centre. A really soft centre. Pretty much liquid, honesty. There's not even so much a tough shell to crack to reach it as there's a sturdy container keeping it all from spilling out in a mess if you hit her too hard.
Amber stands tall and proud most of the time, and carries herself with confidence. She doesn't like to admit when she doesn't know where she's going and what she's doing, and so always tries to look like, while it may not be important business, she does have something she's doing right now. Even if she's not really doing anything for real, she's always thinking and planning, her mind constantly occupied with some sort of pursuit. She's a very bright, very observant woman with a keen interest in research.
Though, if approached, she will put whatever she's doing, real or fabricated, on hold for someone else, never hesitating to tip her hat in greeting to friend or stranger. She's always ready to make a new friend, and happy to lend a helping hand.
Amber is a woman of boundless patience, be you human or pokemon. She'll take a lot crap and just grin and deal with it, letting it roll off her like water off a duck's back. She's not even bottling it up, but simply convincing herself, really and truly, that it doesn't matter. You have to push her pretty far, make her exhaust all of her efforts to find a reason to not give up on you, before she'll finally throw her arms up the air, exclaim, "Screw it!" and march off. And, even then, a heartfelt apology will probably bring her right back unless the circumstances are particularly severe.
That's not to say she's a doormat. In fact, she's actually pretty stubborn. While she'll go out of way to help and be friendly to others, trying to convince her to do something against her personal morals will result in a firm, unmoving 'no,' no matter the begging, pleading, blackmail, or outright threats are thrown her way. She needs to be genuinely convinced with real information that a course of action is the right one, though even then, a tiny streak of stubborn pride may make her refuse all the same if it's not a life-or-death situation.
All in all, though, she's a sweetheart, with a general policy of non-violence. The only times she can be sparked into violent action is in defense of herself and others, and even then she's one to try to subdue someone before resorting to hurting them. She's just far too empathetic to ever want to see anyone, human or pokemon, hurt, let alone to inflict the pain herself. If it comes down to it, though, she's not afraid to stand her ground and throw a few punches if that's what it takes.
Amber does have a bit a mischievous streak, but it crops up in subtle ways, and she likes to mess with people and their expectations. One way in particular is in her voice. Amber talks in a thick 'southern' accent, very similar her own father's natural accent, nearly all the time when dealing with other people, only dropping it in cases when she's too upset to bother maintaining it or when she's being deadly serious, and even when she does drop it she still has a clear, natural twang.
She's well aware of, and not a fan of, the stereotypes associated with such an accent, which makes it all the more satisfying when she starts rattling off a wealth of information effortlessly and leaves those who assumed she was a stupid farm girl gaping at her, all without dropping the accent in the slightest. Teaching a valuable lesson about judging on appearances, and getting to see a priceless facial expression. Perfect. She'll gladly pretend that she had no idea that they thought that way to let them save face, however. She'd have to really not like someone to actually want to cause them severe embarrassment.
Likes: Sunny days, reading, cute pokemon, elegant-looking pokemon, odd-looking or mutated pokemon, physical exertion, bitter foods, mildly sweet foods, herbal teas
Dislikes: People who are needlessly cruel or consider themselves 'above' others, being lied to and manipulated, fighting, overly sweet foods, heavy rain
Backstory: Amber's a New Pallet girl, born and raised. While many of the Joys on the new world took to building and working in Inns, her mother and father started up a pidgey ranch instead, and it was there that Amber grew up. Her and her older sister, Rhona, only a year her senior, would run through the ranch property, laughing and playing games, only to be eventually reined in and made to do their chores.
Amber needed less encouraging than Rhona, as she adored the pidgey. More than once, when she was upset, her parents would find her in the coup making conversation with the birds, telling them all her problems. Well, as much of a conversation as she could have with something that only chirped back at her; she told her parents more than once that she was going to teach her favourite hen, Belinda, how to talk. They largely laughed in a 'isn't that cute' way at her, but the hen herself actually seemed to her humouring her as they caught the two of them on more than one occasion having a 'lesson.' In fact, they often found more than just Belinda there, but they guessed that that was more because Amber always brought pidgey feed with her and gave out handfuls to 'good students.'
As Amber grew up, her best friends were the pidgeys, the ranch's domestic growlithe, and a few of the boys in neighbouring farms and ranches. She shied away from the more rough-and-tumble games the boys played, but not a one could beat her in a race. Even as she reached her teenage years, she occupied a category of not-quite-one-of-the-boys. She gained one more friend, however, when her father showed up one day when she was fourteen with a pair of skiddo for her and her sister.
They were tamed ferals, he said, that he'd bought from the trainer who had captured and tamed them. Their mother was less than thrilled by their presence initially, though the fact that they didn't eat much, being able to photosynthesize and get nutrients from the soil, meant that she was pretty quickly won over as her own love of pokemon took over. Rhona immediately took the female of the pair, cooing over how adorable the little goat pokemon was. Amber, on the other hand, marched up to the male, patted him on the head, and asked him if he thought he could beat her in a foot race.
This reminder that there were more pokemon in the world than the ranch's pidgey and her father's old growlithe sparked a desire to learn more in Amber, and she was soon leaving the ranch whenever she had the free time and either wandering into town to chat with any trainers she found or, to her mother's initial horror, out into the nearby wilds to watch the feral pokemon; she was fascinated by watching them interact, and by some of the strange-looking specimens she saw. She had to run a couple of times when the pokemon turned hostile, her skiddo, whom she named Blaine, right behind her, but for the most part her excursions never turned out to be too dangerous.
Still, she soon limited herself to the tamed and semi-tamed companions of local trainers for her studying, for the sake of her family's collective nerves. That and books. While always having a healthy appreciation for reading, Amber was soon reading anything related to pokemon she could find. By the time she was sixteen, little Blaine now a big gogoat, some of the young men around town were coming around the ranch to talk to her instead during her daily rides, always bringing their newest captures so that she could say hello.
...Though, that soon slowed to a stop, and Amber had no idea why, until she found out from Rhona that most of them had been coming around more because of Amber than any desire to discuss pokemon, and Rhona had taken pity on the boys and informed them that Amber's interests didn't lie with opposite gender. When Amber pointed out that she never claimed anything of the sort, Rhona pointed out in turn that the only person she had ever been smitten with was a local girl who had recently moved away to Port City. When Amber said that that didn't mean she couldn't have interest in men too, Rhona asked her if she had liked any of the men who came around the ranch, and finally she admitted that, no, she didn't. She'd never even thought about it.
A year later, Rhona left the ranch to get a job at the local Inn, run by one of their aunts, and Amber now had all the more work to do. Their parents hired a couple of young men to help out, but they also ended having, to their surprise, another child, and Amber's much-younger brother, Scott, took up a lot of time. To add to the list of changes, Amber ended up having a sudden growth spurt despite already being seventeen that, by the end of it, left her taller than both her mother and sister.
During the following years, Amber was pressured to do what she very much didn't want to: grow up. That was because 'growing up' seemed to be defined by giving up everything she didn't want to. Giving up her long rides on Blaine--though, admittedly, while she was growing up, Blaine was starting to grow old, and she would have had to give that up soon anyway--the trips into town to talk to local trainers, the 'flight of fancy' that she could teach pokemon to talk, which was something she always hung onto even though she'd largely given up on the idea that she'd fill their coup with chattering pidgey.
What made it hurt all the more was that Belinda died not long before she turned eighteen, and old Rusty, their growlithe, who by this point was blind in both eyes from age, grew very sick and died not long after her birthday. Her parents found her out with Blaine, her face buried in his leafy mane and crying her eyes out from stress and grief.
She spent three years working at the ranch and spending her precious free time buried in her books. She tore into books of old-world pokemon knowledge, and studied what she could of research on the world she knew. The numerous gaps in the knowledge sparked her imagination, making her wonder how much of the old knowledge could apply here, how much didn't, and what was out there that remained undiscovered. She wanted to know. She wanted to go out there and discover.
The opportunity opened up when her sister moved back onto their family's ranch, a husband in tow, giving them a few extra hands around the ranch, but it took another two years, at age twenty-three, for her to finally decide on her course in life and take the plunge. There was pressure, these days, to go out into the world and form new settlements, and while she was not exactly the type to go settling these places, she could explore and uncover valuable knowledge for those who did. She announced that she was leaving the ranch, and going to be a researcher.
Her family was skeptical, but they supported her decision nonetheless. Amber took the money she'd been scraping together and hired a local mercenary to escort her safely to Port City. A bit overly cautious, maybe, but it wouldn't do to run afoul of the local wildlife when she was so close to the start of her new life, especially since Blaine was determined to enjoy his golden years back home, his most strenuous thing now asked of him being a gentle walk around with Scott on his back, and so wasn't coming with her.
She was on her own. Starting over.
Appearance: Amber is from the Joy line, the bloodline of pink-haired women that could seem identical to those who passed them by, in appearance, voice, and even how they carried themselves. One in every city. With the old world gone, and with it many of the old pressures for Joys to be Joys, Amber still looks very similar to what you would see in those pictures of old world Joys, though not exact.
For one, Amber is pretty tall, standing at one hundred and seventy-three centimeters (just barely over five feet, eight inches) with a willowy figure. Her hair, bleached by the sun, is a pale pastel pink rather than the usual more vibrant shade, and is generally tied into a long, single braid that hangs to her mid-back rather than put up in such 'silly,' as she'd put it, hair loops. Her skin is generally tanned from physical labor, the same labor that has left nigh-unnoticeable lean muscles on her slender frame; Amber is stronger than she looks, though her physical prowess is more geared toward speed, agility, and endurance than brute strength.
The last thing that sets her apart is that, on her otherwise dead-ringer-for-an-old-world-Joy face, she has a pair of pale, icy blue eyes that are just light enough a shade to blend slightly with her eye whites and give her an intense, and some would say creepy, stare.
Everyday Clothes: Amber dresses like a cowgirl, for the most part. Those old jeans she likes to wear, which had belonged to her mother and older sister before passed on to her, have certainly seen better days, the blue colour faded in numerous places with outright tears in the knees, not to mention her lack of figure and greater height in comparison to the jeans' previous owners means that they've been obviously tailored around the hips, and she tends to tuck her pant legs into her boots to hide the fact that her legs are a bit too long for them.
Her shirts, all of them with short or no sleeves, are generally cheap linen, a plain pale tan shade rather than the kind of bright colours one could get from dyeing the fabric, and her boots are equally simple and made of leather. She has a pair of fingerless gloves, also made of simple, unadorned leather, that she's very fond of wearing.
Her most prized possession, however, is her cowgirl hat. It's jet black, and belonged to her father before being passed onto her when she was seventeen. It's a bit beaten up, but she loves it and wears it everywhere; she gets a kick out of tipping it whenever she says hello.
Formal Garbs: None. She's not terribly interested in owning any, either.
Pack: Amber, when possible, stuffs all of her belongings in a backpack. It primarily blue and grey in colour, a bit old and beat up with a couple of patches sown into it, but it gets the job done.
Personality: Amber, in a nutshell, is a tough ranch girl with a soft centre. A really soft centre. Pretty much liquid, honesty. There's not even so much a tough shell to crack to reach it as there's a sturdy container keeping it all from spilling out in a mess if you hit her too hard.
Amber stands tall and proud most of the time, and carries herself with confidence. She doesn't like to admit when she doesn't know where she's going and what she's doing, and so always tries to look like, while it may not be important business, she does have something she's doing right now. Even if she's not really doing anything for real, she's always thinking and planning, her mind constantly occupied with some sort of pursuit. She's a very bright, very observant woman with a keen interest in research.
Though, if approached, she will put whatever she's doing, real or fabricated, on hold for someone else, never hesitating to tip her hat in greeting to friend or stranger. She's always ready to make a new friend, and happy to lend a helping hand.
Amber is a woman of boundless patience, be you human or pokemon. She'll take a lot crap and just grin and deal with it, letting it roll off her like water off a duck's back. She's not even bottling it up, but simply convincing herself, really and truly, that it doesn't matter. You have to push her pretty far, make her exhaust all of her efforts to find a reason to not give up on you, before she'll finally throw her arms up the air, exclaim, "Screw it!" and march off. And, even then, a heartfelt apology will probably bring her right back unless the circumstances are particularly severe.
That's not to say she's a doormat. In fact, she's actually pretty stubborn. While she'll go out of way to help and be friendly to others, trying to convince her to do something against her personal morals will result in a firm, unmoving 'no,' no matter the begging, pleading, blackmail, or outright threats are thrown her way. She needs to be genuinely convinced with real information that a course of action is the right one, though even then, a tiny streak of stubborn pride may make her refuse all the same if it's not a life-or-death situation.
All in all, though, she's a sweetheart, with a general policy of non-violence. The only times she can be sparked into violent action is in defense of herself and others, and even then she's one to try to subdue someone before resorting to hurting them. She's just far too empathetic to ever want to see anyone, human or pokemon, hurt, let alone to inflict the pain herself. If it comes down to it, though, she's not afraid to stand her ground and throw a few punches if that's what it takes.
Amber does have a bit a mischievous streak, but it crops up in subtle ways, and she likes to mess with people and their expectations. One way in particular is in her voice. Amber talks in a thick 'southern' accent, very similar her own father's natural accent, nearly all the time when dealing with other people, only dropping it in cases when she's too upset to bother maintaining it or when she's being deadly serious, and even when she does drop it she still has a clear, natural twang.
She's well aware of, and not a fan of, the stereotypes associated with such an accent, which makes it all the more satisfying when she starts rattling off a wealth of information effortlessly and leaves those who assumed she was a stupid farm girl gaping at her, all without dropping the accent in the slightest. Teaching a valuable lesson about judging on appearances, and getting to see a priceless facial expression. Perfect. She'll gladly pretend that she had no idea that they thought that way to let them save face, however. She'd have to really not like someone to actually want to cause them severe embarrassment.
Likes: Sunny days, reading, cute pokemon, elegant-looking pokemon, odd-looking or mutated pokemon, physical exertion, bitter foods, mildly sweet foods, herbal teas
Dislikes: People who are needlessly cruel or consider themselves 'above' others, being lied to and manipulated, fighting, overly sweet foods, heavy rain
Backstory: Amber's a New Pallet girl, born and raised. While many of the Joys on the new world took to building and working in Inns, her mother and father started up a pidgey ranch instead, and it was there that Amber grew up. Her and her older sister, Rhona, only a year her senior, would run through the ranch property, laughing and playing games, only to be eventually reined in and made to do their chores.
Amber needed less encouraging than Rhona, as she adored the pidgey. More than once, when she was upset, her parents would find her in the coup making conversation with the birds, telling them all her problems. Well, as much of a conversation as she could have with something that only chirped back at her; she told her parents more than once that she was going to teach her favourite hen, Belinda, how to talk. They largely laughed in a 'isn't that cute' way at her, but the hen herself actually seemed to her humouring her as they caught the two of them on more than one occasion having a 'lesson.' In fact, they often found more than just Belinda there, but they guessed that that was more because Amber always brought pidgey feed with her and gave out handfuls to 'good students.'
As Amber grew up, her best friends were the pidgeys, the ranch's domestic growlithe, and a few of the boys in neighbouring farms and ranches. She shied away from the more rough-and-tumble games the boys played, but not a one could beat her in a race. Even as she reached her teenage years, she occupied a category of not-quite-one-of-the-boys. She gained one more friend, however, when her father showed up one day when she was fourteen with a pair of skiddo for her and her sister.
They were tamed ferals, he said, that he'd bought from the trainer who had captured and tamed them. Their mother was less than thrilled by their presence initially, though the fact that they didn't eat much, being able to photosynthesize and get nutrients from the soil, meant that she was pretty quickly won over as her own love of pokemon took over. Rhona immediately took the female of the pair, cooing over how adorable the little goat pokemon was. Amber, on the other hand, marched up to the male, patted him on the head, and asked him if he thought he could beat her in a foot race.
This reminder that there were more pokemon in the world than the ranch's pidgey and her father's old growlithe sparked a desire to learn more in Amber, and she was soon leaving the ranch whenever she had the free time and either wandering into town to chat with any trainers she found or, to her mother's initial horror, out into the nearby wilds to watch the feral pokemon; she was fascinated by watching them interact, and by some of the strange-looking specimens she saw. She had to run a couple of times when the pokemon turned hostile, her skiddo, whom she named Blaine, right behind her, but for the most part her excursions never turned out to be too dangerous.
Still, she soon limited herself to the tamed and semi-tamed companions of local trainers for her studying, for the sake of her family's collective nerves. That and books. While always having a healthy appreciation for reading, Amber was soon reading anything related to pokemon she could find. By the time she was sixteen, little Blaine now a big gogoat, some of the young men around town were coming around the ranch to talk to her instead during her daily rides, always bringing their newest captures so that she could say hello.
...Though, that soon slowed to a stop, and Amber had no idea why, until she found out from Rhona that most of them had been coming around more because of Amber than any desire to discuss pokemon, and Rhona had taken pity on the boys and informed them that Amber's interests didn't lie with opposite gender. When Amber pointed out that she never claimed anything of the sort, Rhona pointed out in turn that the only person she had ever been smitten with was a local girl who had recently moved away to Port City. When Amber said that that didn't mean she couldn't have interest in men too, Rhona asked her if she had liked any of the men who came around the ranch, and finally she admitted that, no, she didn't. She'd never even thought about it.
A year later, Rhona left the ranch to get a job at the local Inn, run by one of their aunts, and Amber now had all the more work to do. Their parents hired a couple of young men to help out, but they also ended having, to their surprise, another child, and Amber's much-younger brother, Scott, took up a lot of time. To add to the list of changes, Amber ended up having a sudden growth spurt despite already being seventeen that, by the end of it, left her taller than both her mother and sister.
During the following years, Amber was pressured to do what she very much didn't want to: grow up. That was because 'growing up' seemed to be defined by giving up everything she didn't want to. Giving up her long rides on Blaine--though, admittedly, while she was growing up, Blaine was starting to grow old, and she would have had to give that up soon anyway--the trips into town to talk to local trainers, the 'flight of fancy' that she could teach pokemon to talk, which was something she always hung onto even though she'd largely given up on the idea that she'd fill their coup with chattering pidgey.
What made it hurt all the more was that Belinda died not long before she turned eighteen, and old Rusty, their growlithe, who by this point was blind in both eyes from age, grew very sick and died not long after her birthday. Her parents found her out with Blaine, her face buried in his leafy mane and crying her eyes out from stress and grief.
She spent three years working at the ranch and spending her precious free time buried in her books. She tore into books of old-world pokemon knowledge, and studied what she could of research on the world she knew. The numerous gaps in the knowledge sparked her imagination, making her wonder how much of the old knowledge could apply here, how much didn't, and what was out there that remained undiscovered. She wanted to know. She wanted to go out there and discover.
The opportunity opened up when her sister moved back onto their family's ranch, a husband in tow, giving them a few extra hands around the ranch, but it took another two years, at age twenty-three, for her to finally decide on her course in life and take the plunge. There was pressure, these days, to go out into the world and form new settlements, and while she was not exactly the type to go settling these places, she could explore and uncover valuable knowledge for those who did. She announced that she was leaving the ranch, and going to be a researcher.
Her family was skeptical, but they supported her decision nonetheless. Amber took the money she'd been scraping together and hired a local mercenary to escort her safely to Port City. A bit overly cautious, maybe, but it wouldn't do to run afoul of the local wildlife when she was so close to the start of her new life, especially since Blaine was determined to enjoy his golden years back home, his most strenuous thing now asked of him being a gentle walk around with Scott on his back, and so wasn't coming with her.
She was on her own. Starting over.
