Post by clarisse on Apr 12, 2010 20:42:34 GMT -7
THE HANDLER
NAME: Clarisse Rocio Loyola
NICKNAME: Clar (pronounced like 'Claire')
CLASSIFICATION: Human
GENDER: Female
AGE & BIRTHDAY: 19; May 6th
APPEARANCE: Clarisse is an attractive brunette with cloud-gray eyes and pouty lips. She stands at a slightly-above-average 5'9”, and weighs in at just under 130 pounds. Her curly hair hangs nearly to the center of her back, while her bangs, unless tucked behind her ears, fall into her eyes. Her face is heart-shaped with a gently pointed chin, highly-visible cheekbones, and full cheeks. This gives her an “child-like” look, making her seem far younger than her nineteen years.
She's thin, with long limbs, giving her a willowy appearance. However thin she appears, though, she does have a good deal of muscle. Her long hair is usually worn in an up-do, either braids or complicated knots. Her skin is tan, and her legs and arms are covered with various scratches and scrapes from outdoor living. There is a single tattoo on her left upper arm, a sort of brand. It is a small, tribal-like image of a highly-thorned rose. She doesn't have piercings of any kind; not because she doesn't like them, but because it would be too easy for an errant ring to get caught and pulled out.
ATTIRE: Living in a warm climate has offered Clarisse a chance to wear mostly shorts and T-shirts for her entire life with few exceptions. She wears short skirts, as well, but does tend more toward shorts when she's outside. When she dresses “up”, she normally wears dresses and comfortable heels, but outdoors, she'll don a pair of hiking boots. She does know how to dress for cold weather, and when she has to, she prefers jeans and sweaters, donning winter boots and a heavy coat only when it is below 45 degrees and/or there is snow.
Makeup is more or less essential to Clarisse. She especially loves lipstick and perfume. She believes that the right shade of lipstick can make it look like she's wearing more than she is, and that way she doesn't have to spend a great deal of money on makeup every time she buys it. Perfume is only worn when she's dressed up, however. As much as she likes it, scents are simple enough for animals to get wind of without adding flowery undertones to them.
PLAY BY: Dominique Swain
THE CREATION
NAME: N/A
POWER LIST: None
DETAILED POWER: N/A
THE POTENTIAL
ALIGNMENT/OCCUPATION: Unaffiliated
WEAPONS: AK-47 Tactical Rifle, Zilla-Tool (multi-tool)
PERSONALITY: Clarisse was born vivacious. Her zest for life and almost limitless energy makes it hard for her to sit still when she is not stimulated, and she grows restless when she begins to feel bored. She is a vivid dreamer, often reliving the nightmarish parts of her life in stunning detail. Still, she's fairly charismatic, and can be friendly (or at least give the appearance of being friendly when called upon). When she's frightened, she tends to talk more than the average person, and when she's bored, she'll reach for a stick of chewing gum. She occupies herself by blowing bubbles and popping them loudly.
She has a hardened side. Sexual abuse gave her a fear of intimate relations, and she thusly avoids most men, unless they're offering her money for her services as a hired gun. Money is one of few things in life that she truly cares about, and when she is hired, she works to the best of her abilities, as to maximize her income. The only time she manages to sit still is when she's waiting on a target, and then she can be both stealthy and stationary for extremely extended periods, as she is stimulated, and trying to earn her keep at the same time.
Also, she lacks a certain modesty. Having grown up around men and women and being forced into large, communal "washings" that usually meant being tossed naked with a dozen or so others into a spring or small lake, she doesn't really have a problem with showing her body to people. She understands that certain folks don't appreciate lack of modest behavior, so she tries to control it around "dignified" people. But if she gets a scrape or a pain on a part of her body that by society's standards should be covered, they shouldn't be surprised to see her lifting her shirt or pulling her pants down to get a better look.
SKILLS: She knows reading and writing, speaks both Spanish and English, and has been trained in several forms of combat, including hand to hand and guerrilla strikes, as well as sniper abilities. She is also versed in trail-lore and can recognize many beneficial plants.
STRENGTHS: Apart from the skills mentioned above (all of which she considers to be strengths), Clarisse is a skilled climber with a soft spot for children. She takes direction well, and she can follow orders to the letter. She's dependable and hard-working when she's on the job, and there is no greater feeling in the world for her than to see a difficult task through to the end.
WEAKNESSES: Remember that soft spot for children we talked about? Yeah, unfortunately, children are the only ones said soft spot applies to. She doesn't care about most other people in the emotional sense, because most of the adults that she's known have all been jerks and totally deserve whatever terrible punishment they get. When not following instructions, she can be a tad impulsive, and has been known on more than one occasion to go off into a dangerous situation by herself. Also, she may be a skilled climber, but her swimming skills are practically non-existent. She just never really learned. She can doggy-paddle in extreme circumstances, but prefers to avoid water when she can. While she does take direction well, if a person takes too much control, she does find ways to be spiteful. This can include anything from giving them water spiked with dirt or insects to dropping large (but mostly harmless) snakes or spiders down the back of their shirts. She speculates that she does this partly to make up for being tortured when she couldn't do anything about it.
THE STORY
HISTORY: Clarisse Rocio Loyola was born May 6th, 1990 in Bogota, Colombia to U.S. Ambassador Louisa Young and a Colombian journalist named Francisco Loyola. The pair never married, but they raised their daughter together for almost seven years. She was given the most that two upper middle-class parents could offer, but her time with her parents was cut short the night that a Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia terrorist cell bombed a restaurant where they and nearly a hundred other people were dining. Young Clarisse, only six years old and staying with a friend of her mother's while they were out, was orphaned, and deposited in an orphanage on the outskirts of Bogota.
The orphanage was run by a local church, and, while poor, was not horrible. The nuns who served as teachers and caretakers were strict, but kind and fair, and while she was in the school there, she excelled in her reading and writing, though she did struggle a bit with arithmetic, she got passable marks and made a few friends. In spite of being raised for a time entirely by nuns, however, she developed little religious faith. She said her prayers as instructed, but wasn't sure if she believed in what she was doing. She did enjoy the singing and chanting, and memorized the sounds of them.
But five years after her parents were killed, Clarisse's world was rocked again when another cell of the FARC raided the orphanage, looking for soldiers. She, along with a dozen or so of the other children, were taken into the forests to begin training in the same terrorist tactics that had murdered her parents half a decade previous.
The forests of Colombia were perfect for the warfare that the FARC trained their young, unwilling recruits in. They were trained in weaponry, mine-laying, sniping, and hand to hand combat. However, they were also fed drugs, raped, tortured, and generally treated like crap. Several of the girls, Clarisse included, became pregnant at least once during their time in the FARC, but each pregnancy was terminated. Of course, this behavior did not endear the terrorists to their captives, but the food and “shelter” they provided kept the children close.
The torture was worse. The children were beaten every time they missed a shot, they were thrown into deep water whenever they complained of being hot or thirsty, and were marched over rugged terrain for hours, sometimes days, when they complained of being tired. Complaints fell on deaf ears, and the young soldiers soon learned not to. While in the long run, it did build strength, endurance, and mental toughness in the ones that lived, several of them didn't survive the harsh beatings, some drown when thrown into the water, and several died of exhaustion on the days-long hikes.
The drugs they were fed ranged from hallucenogenics to depressants, and everything between. They were forced to fight foes that didn't exist and battle raging cases of depression, and were kept going on long marches by being fed high doses of excitatory drugs. Often, they didn't survive. Again, the trainers thought of this as ways to have children confront their fears, and it typically wiped most emotion away almost completely.
Rising through the ranks of the child-soldiers was not a difficult task. Between the constant fights with the government, in which several children could be killed at once, and death from drug overdose or some other harsh situation, the ranks didn't last too long. In her second year with the FARC, Clarisse was put in charge of a small cell known as Corona de Espinas. Each of the children in her cell was highly trained in weaponry and sniping and had lasted at least a year in the ranks. They were branded with a small tattoo on their arm, a rose with several sharp thorns arranged in a circle below it. It was to help them identify each other in the field.
Corona de Espinas was an elite cell designed for hit and run tactical assassinations, which actually wasn't as dangerous as the hand to hand guerrilla fighting the others were forced to engage in. Some of the children in the group were rather young, however, and Clarisse developed something of a soft spot for them. In the night, after their missions were completed, she would build a fire and then sing softly to them the church songs that had inspired her so much when she was younger.
She spent several years as head of the Corona, and she was seventeen when the cease-fire was forced on the FARC. Throughout the six years that she had been with the terrorist cell, Clarisse had lost her virginity, two children, nearly drowned a multitude of times, been shot more than two dozen times, battled three major infections, and tried to fight off a drug addiction. She hated her captors for stealing her away from the only home she'd known for five years, but she was grateful to them as well. She had learned to handle fear, pain, and near-death, had built up immunity to several common viruses, and most of all, how to be a good soldier. She was now in possession of skills that would make her self-sufficient.
All of the children were reclaimed by the government after the cease-fire, and they attempted to free the young soldiers from the brainwashing they'd gotten from the terrorists. Many of them, like Clarisse, were too ingrained to be completely freed, but the government did offer them homes and decent medical treatment. Having grown fond of the forest life, as soon as she was healed, and all of the drugs had been cleared from her system Clarisse returned to her previous home. She built herself a small hut, and is currently surviving on her skills, an AK-47, and a mutli-tool.
With few prospects for a decent life, she decided to become some sort of gun for hire, using her skills to lead hunting expeditions, treks through the forests and mountains, and even manhunts. Her abilities can be sold to the highest bidder and she won't care, but she forms few relationships that extend beyond business, and it's been working for her so far...
