DENN: OOC thread

Name: Samantha Fox
Gender: Female
Age: 18
Appearance: Samantha is tall and willowy with a delicate figure. Her naturally wavy, light brown hair is extensively highlighted and frames the narrow oval of her face. She takes care of her appearance with a thorough application of pale lipstick and powder that she compulsively touches up whenever possible. Her large deep green eyes are underlined for emphasis. The overall effect is rather becoming in an ethereal way, despite Samantha's doe-eyed, helpless expression. Sh is very self-conscious and affects sophistication around strangers. Only with friends is she open and impulsive.

Samantha is a firm believer in first impressions, and tries to look composed and capable. She wears skinny jeans, tall boots, lacy camisoles, cropped sweaters, and trim dark jackets with fur on the hood. All of her clothes are strictly neutral shades of grey and brown, sometimes a dusty pink. In the summer, she wears batik-print cotton skirts that rustle when she walks and slim white sandals.

History: Samantha's family is of thoroughly middle-class origin. When her father died in one of the small, periodic wars (Samantha was 5, Alexander was 7) the family moved to a resort town, renting out the city house. Samantha grew up in a neighbourhood of similarly wealthy families. A capable student, she made A's and B's and took courses in ballet, watercolours and photography, but never lost the sense that Alexander's achievements were overshadowing her own. He was slated for a prestigious scholarship at the capital university. When he left home two years ago the house seemed a lot larger and she found her horizons expanding.

Samantha's joint interest in watercolour landscapes and photography led to a desire to see the world by travelling Denn, which she had seen little of outside her country town, when she had graduated. Alexander's phone call came at the perfect moment.

Personality: Samantha tries to appear very polite and demure but comes off as a little affected. She has a hard time saying no and frequently finds herself agonizing through dreary situations that other people would simply walk out of. Behind the mannered veneer she is just a well-intentioned, idealistic, naive young adult who would not survive a day out in the great big world without her brother's faithful Pokemon to protect her. Samantha has a vague idea that her trip might be turned into a photo documentary that exposes the suffering of the poor, which she genuinely sympathizes with despite not knowing anyone lower class. In general, Samantha is very sympathetic for the pain of others, Pokemon or human, sometimes moved to tears by the most everyday events. She might make a decent social worker if she had any nerve.

Pokemon:

Jackie, male Houndoom, lv. 27
Jackie was raised primarily as a guard dog - it's what the species is known for. He is very alert and protective, spending most of his time by Samantha's side. In battle, his style is lunge-and-bite. He understands a handful of human words.
Attacks: Fire Fang, Counter, Pursuit, Bite

Lora, female Linoone, lv. 20
Unlike Jackie, Lora was more of a house pet and not inclined towards fighting. The domestic life has made her rather plump and slow. However, she has a nasty temper and sharp claws.
Attacks: Headbutt, Tickle, Slash, Sand-Attack

Items: Folding aluminium bike, rations for a week, canned Pokemon food, sleeping bag, rechargeable torch, a second set of clothing, a first-aid kit, Pokemon paraphernalia (potions & berries), a Pokemon field guide (a book) and lots of money safe in an inner pocket of the trainer pack. I wonder how it all fits.

Name: Riley Forrester

Gender: Female

Age: 24

Personality: Riley is one of those people who you can never tell how they are thinking; she appears fairly closed off, but will often step up and make the first move when it comes to new people, especially if they seem nervous or shy. She'll do her best to make people feel at ease around her and tries to keep her mood constant to help maintain group morale, particularly among younger people.

However, she's often just pretending to be cheerful, and can be upset by unkind words that most other people would find funny or brush off like nothing. When it comes to deciding things she can be ditzy and indecisive, but will put her foot down and make descisions when it's necessary.

She makes friends easily and trusts people far too readily, often to the detriment of her own well-being, but she is also stubborn and will hold a grudge for a long time. She is very prone to being taken advantage of, and can often find herself doing extra work to make up for what others have lumped on her.

Riley is a very gentle, laid-back person who will often go out of her way to make people feel more at ease, though she has to watch herself to ensure she's not being taken advantage of.

Appearance: Riley is very tall, around 5 foot 9, and her height hides a little excess puppy fat around her middle. She likes to wear her chestnut-brown hair in a tight ponytail with a side fringe parted to the right clipped in place by a small pink kirby grip. She's very lightly tanned, and her general complexion is very freckly but she has a few scars on her face from when she had chicken pox as a child. Her eyes are a dark brown colour, and she always has to apply mascara to prevent her fine eyelashes from disappearing in the right light.

She has a smattering of scars across her face from chicken pox, and this also affected her left shoulder which is very pitted from the scars. She has a tiny pawprint tattoo on her right thumb and a tiny red and white pokéball on her left thumb to match up with her first pokémon.

Riley's clothes are all fairly standard and boring; blue jeans and t-shirts in a multitude of colours, often with a pokémon printed on them just to be quirky and different. She wears a necklace her Grandmother left her, which is silver and has an Arceus carved onto the front, and she wears a bracelet given to her for a Christening gift when she was a baby (because she can't get it off!) She does have pierced ears, but only really wears plain silver studs in them because she doesn't like pulling the earrings out to change them.

History: Riley had a fairly ordinary childhood; she went to Trainer School and learnt to read and write, and when she reached 8 years old, her Father gave her her first pokémon - a Growlithe, who had just hatched out of his egg. Once she had recieved him, she began to learn how to battle and train him into the best Growlithe he could be before she took on a local league to test out her skills when she was 11. As a prize, she won her second pokémon - an Eevee.

With these two pokémon, her family took her to Kanto to try against the Gyms there. She had limited success, but she did discover a passion for caring for pokémon rather than battling them. So she began studying back home in Denn about how pokémon live, about their behaviour and about their history that science has found.

When she was old enough, she did a long-distance degree in Pokémon Classic History and passed. Once this was completed, she evolved Growlithe and Eevee into Arcanine and Umbreon, and she began to write books about what she had found from research.

During this research, she started to see holes in the way that the government was ruling the tiny island; though from the outside, things appeared normal, her research lead her to seeing the cracks in the system and the problems this would cause in the future. She tried to think of a way to solve this problem, to help the people out of the crisis that could be coming, but was sadly prevented from completing this when her father was arrested for campaigning against the government.

Her Mother was too frail from a bad kidney infection to travel to free the man of the household, so Riley had taken it upon herself to go to the prison and free her father. She set out with Arcanine, Umbreon and her mother's Seadra and started to prepare to travel through Deep Dark Forest, providing she can find someone to travel with...

Pokemon: Arcanine ('Bunsen'), Umbreon ('Flash') and her mother's Seadra ('Shingle') She doesn't call them by their nicknames often, but I thought I'd include them.

What you are travelling with: In her rucksack, she carries her three pokéballs, a cellular phone, a pocket full of potions 'just in case', a few changes of clothes, a small locked box which contains some of her father's belongings in case she does free him, a lucky amulet her mother made her bring, a small hunting knife and a fleecy blanket.

Name: Reinhold Sternglass
Gender: Male
Age: 19
Personality: Rein is what can be described as cold. His face is pleasant enough - almost angelic in nature - but his personality is almost icy to the touch. A slight smile always hangs on his lips, possibly interpreted as a sneer of disdain or a smile of approval, and therefore he is difficult to be truly understood by the others. He is a bit anti-social, being unwilling to make friends most of the time, but deep down, all of this is clearly because he is shy.

However, this coldness also allows him to collect his nerves and stay calm during a critical situation. His judgment will not be fogged, thus enabling him to analyze the situation and take the best course of action at that time. Rein is a thoroughly intellectual person, in this sense.

Rein is a steadfast and determined Trainer, bent on destroying the current dictatorship. He will often openly express his opinions, sometimes without regarding how other people might react to it; this is especially true when he begins to talk about politics or Pokemon strategy. His coldness only extends as far as people - he's fairly kind to Pokemon, no matter what species they may be. He will engage in combat along with his Pokemon if necessary to fight the government.

WORD COUNT FOR THIS SECTION: 215

Appearance: Rein stands at about 175 cm, or about 5'10" - a fairly medium height. His demeanor is - as mentioned before - almost angelic, with medium-lengthed, well brushed brown hair, sparkling amber eyes glancing in every direction calmly, a slightly hooked nose (a bit detracting), and a smile on his face that could be interpreted in almost a thousand ways. Rein usually wears a semi-formal shirt, most of the time white but possibly blue or black, and denim jeans or black cargo pants. A PokeDex hangs loosely out of his shirt pocket. If the weather happens to be cold, he will add a tan, canvas jacket to the ensemble. Rein wears white, fingerless gloves on his hands, as well as a pure silver watch, engraved with a Pokeball, on his wrist.

He possesses a birthmark in the shape of a crescent moon on his right arm, which was passed down to him by his mother and her family (or so his father says), as well as a small scar on his left shoulder because of a riding accident.

WORD COUNT FOR THIS SECTION: 178

History:
Rein is the son of a (secret) ecoterrorist. His father, Wolfgang, acted secretly in accord with Team Green, and passed off information to Team Green to aid them on their ecoterrorist ventures. Deep down, Wolfgang was a deeply sentimental man who wanted to overthrow the dictatorship. And so, on Rein's 17th birthday, he was discovered and sent off to jail, most of his property confiscated, and Rein (who barely had time to pack) expelled to live with his uncle in the nearby town of Demes.

But it did not all start that way.

Rein was born in the city of Irun, somewhere in the northern part of Denn. His mother died of a mysterious disease, spread in polluted water, when Rein was only seven years old; his personality, once very cheerful, retracted into himself and he became cold, almost sneering and uncaring. Rein's father, Wolfgang, decided to finally do something about the death of his wife, and five years later, after finally contacting Team Green successfully and bribing his way into the dictatorship party, both partially funded Team Green's effort and passed off information to them. And so Wolfgang slowly rose up the ranks of the party.

When a member of Team Green was captured just a month before Rein's seventeenth birthday, he was interrogated and revealed all the names of the rebels in the party. Wolfgang, along with some other dissidents, were arrested and thrown in jail.

So we go back.

Rein, in his childhood, had been fueled by his mother's love towards a desire to read. After his mother's death, Wolfgang became much more caring towards Rein; perhaps it was because of the sorrow of his wife's death that he needed to care for someone. Wolfgang, on a spark of inspiration, pulled Rein out of school and into his home, where Wolfgang possessed a huge reservoir of books. From then on, Rein was homeschooled. Wolfgang's books possessed treatises on Pokemon strategy, essays on Pokemon care, and studies of Pokemon philosophy, as well as tomes of science. It was also at home, then, when Wolfgang gave Rein his first Pokemon - a Sneasel, no less.

"So Sneasel with Razor Claw can evolve into Weavile at night?"

"Ha ha, indeed, my son. I am glad to see you have not failed at learning ever more stores of information."

After Rein started living with his uncle and the arrest of his father, Rein became determined to overthrow the party. When he was of age and did not need a guardian, Rein set on a quest to overthrow the government, free his father, and restore the nation of Denn to a more peaceful and pleasant state.

WORD COUNT FOR THIS SECTION: 438
Pokemon:
Sneasel - Level 35
Swords Dance, Pursuit, Ice Shard, Slash, Agility

Bayleaf - Level 27
Reflect, Magical Leaf, Energy Ball, Poisonpowder, Double Team

Crawdaunt - Level 30
Avalanche, Waterfall, Vicegrip, Harden, Protect

What you are travelling with: A book on Pokemon battle strategies, six potions, four antidotes, a parlyz, burn, and ice heal each, twenty Pokeballs, a length of steel piping, a canvas backpack, and a recipe book for Pokemon food. Enough Pokechow for 7 days.

Name: Marcus Levi
Gender: Male
Age: 19

Personality: Marcus tends to be a terribly anxious person, and this has unfortunately come to be his primary characteristic as he has grown into a "man". Hopefully he still has a chance to gain confidence and relax a little as he ventures timidly into the world of adulthood, but for now he is still a stuttering worrywart anticipating the future with both hope and dread. He flips from optimism to pessimism with frightening speed, rarely pausing to land in the zone of realism in his constant, relentless analysis of possible outcomes of a given event. Also, as a result of his obsessive fretting, he is not much of a leader or a "doer" but rather ends up as the one watching things happen in front of him or following those with more available reserves of confidence than he.

On the plus side, he truly is a well-intentioned young man with a kind heart. He does make an effort to see the good in everybody, though that little nagging voice in the back of his head that reminds him of all the ways people could end up hurting him makes it difficult. Also, though he might not always exhibit the greatest common sense and has a tendency to overthink things he is a bright young man with a hunger for knowledge. At his best, he is earnest and sensitive, and at his worst he's pretty much a wreck plagued by indecisiveness and irrational fear.

Appearance: To summarize in a sentence, Marc is a tall, gangly, perpetually nervous-looking boy with dark eyes and a narrow face dominated by a long, slightly hooked nose. He couldn't exactly be described as fair, what with his features having something a bit darker about them and his skin usually maintaining a light tan. His lengthy, bony limbs are accentuated by his insistence on always wearing clothes that seem just on the verge of being too short. A typical ensemble for him would be a faded old corduroy blazer with patched elbows over a white work shirt, a pair of khakis and sensible, brown shoes. Basically, he dresses like a sixty-year-old man or someone from the early twentieth century. Perhaps his most distinctive feature is his thick mop of straight, dark brown hair. He tries to keep it subdued with frequent haircuts but it always somehow seems to have a disheveled, voluminous presence even when short. He wears a worn tweed flat cap to cover it, but strands of it usually peek out to just brush the tops of his ears.

History: Marcus' grandparents immigrated to Denn's capital city ((not sure where from? Are we using real-world continents or game continents or what?)) with the hopes of starting a successful jewelry business. Things got off to a bit of a rough start when Marcus' grandmother fell ill shortly after giving birth to their first child and soon died, leaving her husband struggling with grief and trying to survive in an inner city neighborhood that was vaguely hostile to foreigners with different habits and beliefs. So Marcus' father only enjoyed the sparse comforts of a single-parent, working class household growing up. With his father away for long shifts at various factory jobs, the boy used his time to study hard and eventually gained a scholarship to a nearby university. However, he wasn't interested in using knowledge to acclimate wealth for himself but rather to try and change things for the better - he soon became involved with a group of student revolutionaries. Some of them were interested in the environment, but their primary focus was overthrowing the dictatorship. They were ambitious but not violent, being young and idealistic pacifists at heart, and they operated mostly by distributing pamphlets, fly-papering posters throughout the city and generally trying to get information to the lower classes.

Eventually, despite their careful covering of tracks, one of their secret meetings was crashed by the police. In the ensuing chaos, Marcus' father was one of the few who managed to escape - but not without the emotional scarring of having seen some of his friends brutalized and killed before his very eyes. With the understanding that almost everyone he had known was either dead or in prison, and that the government possibly had his name on file as a dissident, he fled to the country to lie low for a while. There he met Marcus' mother, a native-born woman, while working as a hand on her parents' farm and eventually married her. They moved out to a little plot of land of their own, and it was here that Marcus was born.

Growing up he had less the average lifestyle of a farm boy, but was more influenced by his father's intellectual leanings. He ate up stories of the government's secret atrocities and of his father's youthful adventures in rebelling against them. His mother was worried; Marcus' dad seemed more and more restless by the day, still unsatisfied with the ongoing mistreatment of the lower classes and suppression of free speech. While Marc split his time between feeding the Miltanks and reading books, discontent grew in the hearts of both his parents. Then, one day when he was about eleven years old, he woke up to find his father gone and his mother, red-eyed and solemn, nursing a lone cup of coffee at the kitchen table.

His mother never was able (or willing) to tell him where his father went, and it haunted Marcus each day of his life. It did not interfere with his studies, however - he worked hard and applied and got into a college in the capital city. His mother was happy for him, although also a little bit worried about the chance of him connecting with his father again. He was determined to go and she decided that his higher education took precedence over the possibility of danger. She allowed Marcus to two of the farm Pokémon with him for protection, although they appear to be more suited for domestic life than fighting. Now he is prepared to journey to the big city, awaiting the possibility of discovering new things or uncovering past secrets.

Pokemon: Xavier the Xatu, lvl. 30, who was found an abandoned chick on the edge of their property and eventually raised into a wise and responsible sort of majordomo for the farm, and almost a surrogate father for Marcus. He has had little opportunity for battle in his life, but he is generally intelligent and could prove to have potential. (ATTACKS: Peck, Night Shade, Lucky Chant, Confuse Ray, Tailwind)

Malka the Purugly, lvl. 15, who just recently evolved and is still adapting to her new, somewhat less sleek body with ill temper. She has been a little spoiled up until now, but she also has a deep affection for Marc and a tenacious personality. (ATTACKS: Bite, Scratch, Fake Out, Hypnosis)

What you are travelling with: A leather satchel containing a couple textbooks on political science and Pokémon biology and some paper, pencils and other scholarly supplies. Also, a battered brown suitcase containing two hefty sacks of Pokéchow kibble, a mess kit, some pasta and rice, a few extra sets of clothing, a couple potions, toothbrush, toothpaste etc. You might wonder how a skinny boy like him can hold all that up - it's through sheer force of will. He carries his wallet in his jacket pocket, not that it has much cash in it.