Post by hef on Aug 20, 2011 21:28:49 GMT -5
...Elisabeth Ann Kyle*
*I never forget.*
[/size]*I never forget.*
...basics*
name Elisabeth Ann Kyle
nickname Ellie
age 15
gender Female
grade Sophomore
hometown Cape Town, South Africa
sexuality Straight
personification A Heffalump
status Dormant
face claim Freya Mavor
...appearance*
hair color Long, curly, dirty blond
eye color Bright, almond shaped, blue. Wears glasses, sometimes.
build Slim to average
height 5'6"
clothing style Jeans, tee shirt, the occasional skirt. She's not really picky, honestly.
distinctive traits Constantly surprised expression, because of her eyes.
...personal*
personality
The Good:
Photographic Memory: Ellie never, ever, ever, forgets. Therefore, all she has to do is see the material once, and she'll know it. FOREVER. Her brain is constantly going, and this definitely gets her creative juices going. She will never forget a name, date, face, time. This gives her the impression of great intelligence, which to a certain extent is true. However, it is absolutely circumstantial.
Artistic: Ellie loves to paint. Its the one time her brain isn't going two hundred and thirty seven miles per hour. Her favorite thing to paint is faces, generally with water colors. But, generally, she'll paint with anything. For instance, if she's in the cafeteria, in order to tune out the noise around her, she'll paint on a napkin with some ketsup and mustard. It centers her. Other than faces she likes interesting architecture.
Unique: Ellie is an individual. She enjoys subjects that others might find unsettling, and is not afraid to share an opinion. In fact, she's fairly blunt about most things, tact being reserved for only special times. However, her honestly, while harsh at times, can also prove a benefit, as one knows that when she compliments someone, she means it. She is also quite insightful, given her age, and has very little enjoyment for frills because of where she grew up (South Africa).
In her opinion, she does not have low self esteem: she has low esteem of everybody else.
That said...
THE BAD:
Misfit: To put it gently, Ellie would never be called Miss Popularity. In less polite words, it would be fair to say she's a bit of a social leper. Her attitude, and it can be a bit dreary at times, is highly fueled by her feeling alienated, but unwilling to admit it. Though, because of her memory, of her photographic memory, Ellie has been used in the past by so called friends. So, for the most part, she stays quiet, never answering questions in class out of paranoia that someone will start to suspect.
Jaded: Ellie has a very 'glass-half-empty' point of view on the world. A die hard cynic, she often buffers her class mates off with sharp sarcasm. Deep down though, she wants friends. Normally, she prefer to avoid engaging with the world more than necessary. However, she is an avid watcher in school, and will occasionally dole out a dollop of advice if her conscious so sways her to get involved. On occasion, this leads to acquaintances, as she is a little paranoid of people getting to close.
Photographic Memory: Yeah, it's on here twice. While its a cool party trick, Ellie honestly hates it. Because her brain is constantly going, she is plagued by tension head aches, panic attacks, and stress induced nose bleeds. She cannot watch certain channels on television, for instance Discovery Health, because they'll show shows on various rare flesh eating viruses. God help us all if she gets a little rash. Also, the term forgive and forget hardly applies to her, because she cannot forget. If you are applying mascara to her, and poke her eye, in fifty years, if you try to put mascara on her, she's going to be freaking out that you'll do it again. All and all, it makes her pretty neurotic at times.
past
Ellie's parents are not cruel or harsh, nor has any major tragedy really struck the young girl's life, save for general catty nonsense from her peers. However, it is an interesting story, nonetheless.
Ellie's Father is named Robert Kyle. He was born in Liverpool, England and lived there until he was twenty three, and recruited to come become an English Professor at the University of the Western Cape. Her Mother, Anita Waeganer, was of born in Monaco, though her parents were Australian, and raised in an almost nomadic communal society. She moved to South Africa when she was sixteen with her family, and stayed behind to work at an orphanage, as children were a great passion hers. Her and Robert Gray met when he came to Cape Town, at a local market. He was enamored with the seventeen year old girl, and wooed her effectively.
And so they married, agreeing to wait on children as they were both passionate about their work. However, as often the case when people partake in unprotected sex under the IRREFUTABLE certainty that they would not get pregnant because of... magic or something... an accident happened.
That accident was Elisabeth Ann Kyle.
Not to say they did not love their daughter. Oh no, they did. They were working parents, but still affectionate. Elisabeth, usually, came first in there list of priorities. Of course, if the Orphanage's water was issuing a foul, metallic, smell it did take precedence over Ellie's macaroni Owl. When she got older, her Mother would often take her to work with her, and she would play with the other children. It was then that Anita noticed her daughter had a talent for names. In fact, Ellie never mixed up anyone's names, and actually knew everyone's in a group of fifty. Needless to say, for a five year old, this was impressive. But it went even beyond that. When Anita began to poke around with her daughters knack, she soon found that Ellie was able to describe in vivid detail what each child was wearing, things they said that day, who was related to who.
Bringing this to the attention of Robert, he at first thought his wife was overreacting. Until Ellie showed him a game that she played at the orphanage: She would allow the other person to flip through a deck of cards, and they would then hand it to her. She would flip through quickly, glancing at the cards one time around, before handing them back to the person. Said person sat back to back with Ellie, and flip through the cards. If she could recite each card number, in order, number and shape, she got the butterscotch candy that her Mother would hand out with lunch from said person. If she failed, the other player got hers. Ellie never lost.
And so, Ellie proved to have a Photographic Memory.
To start out with, Ellie was not at all ashamed, and in fact quite proud of this. She thought it made her special. After she would prove it to her classmates, they would then want her to keep going. Nonstop. All day. Some even asked her to assist in cheating on tests. She felt like a circus monkey. Soon after her first year of 'big kid school' Elisabeth was pulled out to be homeschooled.
Homeschooling was a quiet life, and pretty lonely. Sometimes her tutors would feel bad for her isolation, and bring their children to play with her, but Ellie was wary of them from her school experience. She never wanted to be used again.
Her Mother got her her first easel for her eighth birthday, and Ellie found a refuge. As her age hit the double digits, her parents wanted her to get out of the house more, despite her protest. Her Father would bring her with him to the university, where she was allowed to read quietly. Which, she pointed out often, she could do that just as easy at home, without all the people. But, they insisted. To protest she checked out books from the University Library that were... grisly. While her Mother disapproved, her Father did not bend, figuring out that his daughters ploy. Though, Ellie could tell he regretted it, when she actually seemed to be enjoying the material she was reading.
present
When Elisabeth turned fourteen, her Father got a job transfer to work at The University of New York City. Ellie got the option of going with him, or saying in Cape Town with her Mother, who was staying to continue her work at the orphanage. Having always been interested in seeing the United States, Ellie opted to go with her Dad, and her Mother would come visit them on holidays. She started Frank L. Baum Academy, a boarding school of high esteem, despite living in the New York district. Her Father reasoned that her accent would be far less noticeable, in a place where people came from all over the world to attend.
She was not popular in school. In fact, she much preferred to stay in the back ground. Ellie became so good at being invisible, that her teachers would occasionally mark her absent, despite being in her seat well before the bell rang. She spends her free time rereading books (the repetitiveness rather soothing, as her brain did not have to work to intake new information) and painting. Her paintings were left around the school, as she got them done so fast that she couldn't keep any but the ones that she liked particularly. And even those were hidden under her bed.
family
Robert Kyle: English Professor and Linguist. 39. British accent.
Anita Kyle (nee Waeganer): Child Caretaker at a South African Orphanage. 33. Accent is a mixture of French, Australian, and English.
likes
Horror movies
Painting
Cleanliness
Honeysuckles
Air Conditioning
Soup
Studying certain subjects very thoroughly (her current favorites being Serial Killers, The Inquisition, et cetra. They tend to border on the darker side.)
Mixed Matched Socks.
Candlewax
Video games
dislikes
Spicy food
Walking alone at night
Cats
Meeting new people (pinch of social anxiety)
When people start noticing her memory thing
Reading (she never forgets anything. seriously.)
Over stimulation.
Florescent Lighting
Catchy music, mostly pop.
other notes
Fluent in French, though her accent is awful. Prefers to speak English, incredibly. Also can make polite conversation in Afrikaans, though she can write it fluently, and understand most of it.
...literature*
book title Winnie the Pooh
backstory In the books, Heffalumps are actually just what Winnie the Pooh are afraid is trying to steal his honey, along with Woozles. However, they are never actually seen. Him and Piglet try catching on with the box/string/stick trick, but it fails. They represent an unknown, mysterious, factor that the 100 acre gang assume wants to hurt them because that oh-so-reliable-source Tigger said they would. It's touched on in later books in movies that not all Heffelumps are not evil, proven by Roo befriending Lumpy.
...roleplayer*
name Curly (Real names Susan.)
age 18
gender Female
rp experience Not a whole lot, but I have been writing.
how you found ouac A friend of mine was site hunting, stumbled upon it, and found it so glorious that she told me about it!
rp sample
New York had a population of 19,378,102 people.
84.2% will graduate from High School.
28.5% do not speak English in their homes.
3.0% Are native Hawaiian's or other Pacific Islanders. Which was quite the contrast of the 0.2% that resided in the United States.
Elisabeth sat in her chair, waiting for the school bell to ring. It was easier to be invisible, if she wasn't looking at the faces around her. The faces, they would be imprinted in her mind forever. It was almost unfair. Her Dad constantly worried about Ellie, worried that school was to stimulating for his daughters oddly wired brain. And, to be honest, it was. She knew this. Every face, every whisper of gossip. Elisabeth knew. But she was stubborn. She wanted to be normal, and she could hide it from the classmates. Watching them go about their day to day lives was at least a pinch of social interaction. Far more than she'd receive if she simply stayed locked in her room forever.
The population of New York rose 2.1% from 2010 to 2011.
6.3% of those people are under the age of five.
13.4% are over sixty five.
Sometimes Elisabeth worried that her brain would overload. That she'd be sitting there, focusing on her statistics, and boom. A blood vessel would pop in her brain, she'd break into seizures, and dead Ellie. One, cute, wide eyed, blond haired, round faced, slim hipped, Elisabeth Kyle. Her peers would know her simply as 'that-weird-quiet-girl-who-had-an-accent-when-she-did-speak'. Her parents would remember her as a strange little marvel. They'd wonder if she should have been studied. After all, people with photographic memories were such a rarity, they hadn't been thoroughly studied. Not even enough to be proven as a real occurrence.
Ellie could tell them how real it was.
AS far back as the age of three, Elisabeth could remember every day with perfect clarity. They never got mixed up or jumbled. The scar on her knee, she got at 7:12 pm on December ninth, 2001. She had been refusing to come out of tree for supper, and her Father had threatened to not let her have dessert. Ellie had slipped out of the tree, and landed on a rock. Thirteen stitches, periwinkle blue band aid, grape sucker. It was like it happened yesterday.
51.4% of the New York population was female.
The bell rang, and Ellie looked around, eyes on the teacher. What would they be learning today? Something Ellie already knew? Though, one had to understand, she could recite the facts. But that didn't mean she understood them. Still, she could give off the airs of knowledge, couldn't she? Her mind went instead to her peers.
Someday, maybe, she would get a friend. Someone who wouldn't mind her strangeness. It would be quite nice, thought the sixteen year old. To have a friend.
Who knew, right?
Maybe someday. Maybe school would seem less stimulating. And she could forget something. And a friend would come along. Or, perhaps, nothing would have to change. They could just like her? Unlikely. Ellie made people uneasy. And, truth be told, people made her uneasy as well.
But hey.
A girl could dream, couldn't she?
