Post by spectre on May 9, 2019 21:03:54 GMT -8
Trainer Profile
Character Name: Calista Volkov
Nickname: Callie
Gender: Female
Age: 22
Trainer Class: Ace Trainer
Height: 5'6"
Weight: 135lbs
Hair Color & Style: Calista's hair is naturally a dusty, dirty-blonde colour. She dyes it whenever she can, to a more platinum blonde because she finds her natural colour very dull and boring. It takes a while for her to get around to it, so her usual style includes darker roots, which doesn't look bad, per se, just lazy. Her hair is the kind of wavy -- not quite curly and definitely not quite straight -- that would look very nice if she spent an hour on blowdrying it every morning, but as time and adventures are more important than hair to her, it looks scruffy and messy more often than not. It comes down just past her shoulders and she either wears it the way she wakes up with it, or crocodile clipped up behind her head in a way that almost looks elegant.
Eyes: Her eyes are that blue-grey colour that, depending on whether the critic liked or disliked her, they would either instantly liken to stormy sea ... or a wet paving slab. Her light-coloured iris darkens on the outside, outlined by a bold dark grey, which is fairly striking if anyone were to take the time to stare. Calista usually has her eyes narrowed to slits when she isn't acknowledging anybody else; for no reason alone than she is concentrating hard and in deep thought. The moment she engages with somebody she is interested in engaging with, her eyes widen and this makes her entire face soften.
She lines her eyes most mornings with black pencil eyeliner, which gets pretty smudged by the evenings and gives her a punky look. She wouldn't appreciate this being pointed out to her.
Clothing/Accessories: Calista can most often be found in a variation of one outfit. Starting from the bottom, she wears calf-high black boots with a two-inch heel, giving her the appearance of a 5'8" woman - approximately four inches taller than the average woman. The heel is thick and sturdy and doesn't provide much extra difficulty in walking, but she will probably face some back problems ten years down the line because of her fashion choices. Tucked into her faithful boots she will wear simple black jeans, a little scuffed at the knee but nothing dirty-looking. They can go a long time without being washed, which is always helpful for a serial adventurer. Separated from the jeans by a black belt she wears a couple of different colour tank tops, usually her favourite hot pink, white or grey. She covers her shoulders in cooler weather with a lightweight black jacket, lined with buttons she rarely does up. In very cold weather, she has a thick white scarf and gloves but nothing much else. She tends to simply try to avoid cold weather unless she has time to go to a store beforehand. Aside from her crocodile clip, usually found pinning her messy hair to the back of her head, Calista avoids accessories except for a simple silver Claddagh ring on her right hand. It was given to her by the first boy who claimed to love her, and serves as a reminder, not of him, but of the idea that she should feel free to be who she is.
General Appearance:
Generally, Calista is considered attractive. It might take several minutes with her to realise this fact for two reasons: first, because she is often covered in dust, grime and scratches if she has been travelling alone for a long time, and secondly because despite her best efforts, she very often forgets to smile. Her face is normally twisted into a grimace or deep frown, not for any deep-seated or interesting reason - which honestly sometimes disappoints people she meets along the way - but simply because she spends so much time alone that she never quite learned the skill of the soft, inviting facial expression. Whether she knows it consciously or not, her general glaring appearance has been responsible for the fact that she is very rarely annoyed by strange men when she stops in bars and cafes. Especially if she is otherwise showered and clean.
She is a tall, slender and physically fit young lady, which comes across in the way she carries herself. Though she doesn't have much social confidence, she would never consider herself to be shy. Her posture is proud and upright, her actions deliberate, and when she remembers to smile, it's warm and inviting.
Hometown: Cascadia City, North Godai
Personality: If someone were to describe Calista in a few words, it would of course depend on how well they knew her. A nurse in a pokemon centre would believe her to be curt, terse, and interested in getting things done above all else, like small talk. A chatty, welcoming host might tease out a couple more traits like her wit or willingness to please. All who meet her for just a few minutes tend to forget her almost instantly. Conversely, those who spend many hours with her consecutively will find it hard to forget her soon. So prominent and thick is the shell between her outer and inner personalities.
Initially she will come across as somebody repressed, quiet and uninterested in the world around her. This is because she has spent so much time on her own that she is used to the quiet, and to her own thoughts, and is perfectly happy with only the bare minimum social interaction as she journeys across the land searching for her best friends (her pokemon!)
But after some time - and it isn't too hard to convince Calista to hang out for a little while, though it may be hard to grab her attention when she is in a particularly daydreamy mood - her internal personality will begin to shine through. She is very interested in the idea of helping others out. She is a little bit of a bleeding heart in that sense; she is a huge sucker for a sob story and she will always root for the underdog. If somewhere along the way she gets wind of a story of oppression or unfairness, she will join a protest, quest for supplies, and hum a merry tune along the way. Her voice may be quiet, but she is happy to speak up for anyone who doesn't have one of their own.
Her mother was the one to teach her the difference between right and wrong when she was a young child. Marie Volkov prided herself on being the most caring person in any given room. She was a great hostess and a wonderful listener, and she tried to impart her personal set of values onto each and every one of her five children. Calista was the only one these teachings really ever had an impact on, in her opinion, since her brothers were always off with their father learning to fish or hunt or camping for days on end. The values taught to her were the idea that you must stand up for others.
If you are in the position to help somebody without causing harm to yourself or anyone else, you must consider yourself lucky, because not everyone can reach out a helping hand who wants to.
These words stuck with Calista for a long time, and after a while she didn't even need to remind herself. When somebody along the way needs something she can achieve without harming anyone, or hurting herself, she gets a kind of hot tingling in her chest in anticipation. Besides, her mother used to add, the greatest detours in life always lead to the most memorable adventures. And adventure is one of the major driving forces behind Callie's every move.
Growing up on a ranch with five incredibly strong, confident, loud and capable men created a young woman who is herself stronger than average and more capable than perhaps many of her peers who pursued education over full-time ranch work and then full-time solo adventuring. It also created a young woman who feels she needs to stand out by being quiet and reserved; who finds other people in general to be a little bit too loud. If men remind her of her brothers she is wary of being belittled and teased, and will often remove herself from those situations before she has the chance to be put down. Anything that reminds her of her life post her mother's death and pre her running away from her family to become a trainer is instantly going to witness the side of Calista that gave her an inaccurate reputation of being a very cold person. One just has to treat her with the respect that she believes every human and pokemon deserves in order to see the true warm, silly, imperfect but earnest person she knows she is inside.
Though she tries very hard to be a good person, which can lead her into some pretty awkward and difficult situations that she honestly should walk away from, she has some issues too. She can be arrogant and controlling when it comes to her opinions, especially concerning journeying around. This is why she prefers to travel alone. She likes people when she can stop as a tourist, glance in at their lives, and lend them a cup of sugar ... but Calista is not the sort of person you will find travelling in a group, or even as a duo. She doesn't like to be disagreed with when it comes to things like when to stop and eat, what to eat, where to camp, which towns to stop in and for how long. The best thing to her about being a trainer is the freedom to be totally in charge of her own decisions and her own safety. She trusts herself completely and she has fantastic survival skills. She has not yet met another person she would give the same trust with her life.
Calista has been accused of being an emotional tourist. She will insert herself into a situation that seems unhappy, happily help to make changes, and then she will leave again. If the people believed there to be a deeper connection there, they can get pretty upset by her sudden and total disappearance. Calista likes to think of herself as a sparkler or a firework rather than an enduring flame. She burns very brightly for a very short time, in terms of emotional connection, but then she will suddenly feel uncomfortable, or get itchy feet, and will feel the need to leave in the middle of the night.
She loves pokemon more than anything, however, and any bond she makes with one is sure to last forever. She does not like to keep her pokemon in their pokeballs unless it would endanger them to be outside. This is the reason she doesn't feel lonely very often. Her team of pokemon will very much be her friends.
Calista is fairly introspective, as she spends so much time quietly walking with her own thoughts, and she tends to think of herself as quite a tough and self-sufficient person. As a little girl, she pictured herself with huge powerful Dragon type pokemon. The kind of team that would reflect how she feels on the inside, rather than the slender, wide-eyed young woman she presents to the world. More than anything, possibly in the world, Calista hates to be assumed to be weak. Seriously. Don't do it.
History: Raised on a small ranch by Cascadia City with four older brothers, Calista was taught self-sufficiency and toughness with as much urgency as she was taught to walk.
Her mother Marie was described by her father as a walking angel. She died when Calista was twelve, and her father used to say that he treated her like a queen every second of their time together, because deep down he knew that perfection could not last forever and he would lose her. Calista and her brothers wonder how true this is - they have no specific memories of their gruff, angry father treating their mother like royalty, but since this view is important to him, they always agree.
Calista had a very close relationship with her mother. Her four brothers were always playing sports or off on week-long camping trips or fishing, hunting and hiking with their father. Sometimes they would urge her to go and she would feel flattered and join, but more often than not those excursions would end in her tears when she was a child, because she was simply less capable than her strong, quick teenage siblings. They would sometimes tell her it was because she was a girl, in order to make her feel better, but this would always make her feel so much worse. So she would stay behind most of the time and tend to the ranch with her mother and her mother's elderly faithful Rapidash, Tilly.
During these times alone, before her mother's death, Calista managed to learn how to sew and knit and crochet - though she has long since dismissed the latter two as frivolous hobbies she has no time for - and they would talk about life and the importance of the little things.
The day her mother died was the worst day of Callie's life. A twelve-year-old girl with no mother, who had almost wilfully alienated herself from what remained of her family. Her brothers, at least, treated her with a lot more compassion after that day; they weren't evil, after all, but she quickly grew tired of the kid gloves and willed them to treat her like an equal again. It took her a while to get over this loss, but she managed to get closer to her brothers to help fill the gap her mother left. Except Marco, who was a terrible bully and almost certainly a sociopath, who remained one of the worst things about her life growing up until the day she left.
The ranch, as far as she knows, is still active, but Calista ran away from home when she psyched herself up enough to abandon her family.
The men in her family value physical and mental strength over pretty much every other trait, which goes some way towards explaining why Calista's face goes that gorgeous shade of maroon if somebody implies she is too weak to do something. She grew tired of it as a teenager and decided to leave to work with pokemon and go through the Gyms, but her father and brothers asked her to stay.
Being close, for some time, with her brothers taught her to value strength in herself, since it was the best tool she would go on to use to get things done around the ranch.
Calista managed to collate both sets of values from her upbringing very easily in her mind. Her own physical and mental strength is important to her because she is lucky enough to be able to lend it to others. For this reason she keeps up exercise and makes sure to investigate any potential mental issues before they arise. Calista understands that her time here might be very short, and it is important to her to make an impact. Small or not.
She didn't have many friends growing up because she was homeschooled until the age of eight. At that point, her mother put her foot down and she remembers being a small girl gripping the banisters and listening to her parents fight about this. Her father, Peter, wanted to raise his children the way he wanted to, with no interference and with no mixed messages. Her mother thought this was dangerous, as well as very sad, because the children wanted active daily social lives. She had to threaten to leave and take all five children before Peter conceded, and they went to school.
Her social skills were sub par. She had been teased so mercilessly by her brothers and yet built up so effectively by her mother that her self image even at eight years old was a swirling vortex of contradictions. She would find herself volunteering for every job to prove to everyone (who didn't much care) that she could do it. She recalls one of her most embarrassing formative moments: a teacher idly commenting that she needed something from another room, and Calista wordlessly and seriously taking off like a shot before anyone else could even say a word, hoping they would be commenting on how fast she could run when she returned. They didn't, of course; they all burst into peals of laughter.
After her mother's death she was nervous her father would pull them all from school and she would never leave her family ranch again - because even though she pretty much hated school, she hated home without her mother a little bit more - but seemingly out of respect for her memory, he let them stay. Calista stayed in education until she turned eighteen, applied for colleges left and right, and got into an enormous argument with her father who found the applications and demanded she stay and work at the ranch, get married and stay local because 'that's what it means to be family'.
It took a lot of horrible screaming that day, but finally Peter broke down in tears for the first time in Calista's memory and admitted to her that he just didn't want her to leave. She looked so much like her mother, and he apologised for keeping her at arm's length her entire life, but her presence just made him feel so guilty and useless as a parent - he'd had no idea how to raise a girl.
Though she forgave him, and meant it, that admission didn't serve to make her want to stay. It made her want to leave all the more. The knowledge that her father had been purposefully keeping away from her her whole life made her wonder what kind of person she could be on her own.
Shortly after that fight, Tilly, her mother's Rapidash, passed away peacefully of old age. Calista had given her the utmost love and care for the end of her life and without Tilly it felt like there was truly nothing keeping her there. Her family, she thought, would feel more free and at ease if she wasn't there. And she decided that she shouldn't value anything more than her own fulfilment and happiness for another day. So without so much as leaving a note - a move that would become a trademark of hers - she simply packed some clothes and some food and water and she left to become a trainer.
Calista's secret plan had always been to take her mother's old Rapidash to help her out on the first leg of her journey, but the old fire type was far too old so it had stayed a pipe dream. On the night she left, she had stolen a pokeball from one of her brothers' supplies, and had struggled with and caught the first pokemon bigger than her own fist she had encountered.
It took every ounce of energy she had not to scream with joy, which would have alerted the family Mightyena just an acre away. She held the pokeball in her hand like the most precious glass ornament she had ever touched. Though she actually had no idea what the pokemon was until she checked it (twice) with her PokeDex, she thought it was the most beautiful thing in the world.
Later on, in the cold light of day, she had released her Salandit and been completely stumped once again. What was it? Some kind of dark or ghost type lizard? She had checked for the third time and been told, again, that it was Poison/Fire, which made no sense to her. Any attempt to bond with it by sharing food or water or by chatting to it went ignored.
The pokemon didn't really seem to like her.
The PokeDex had informed her her new partner was a female, which was rarer. She had nicknamed her Angel Food Cake, after one of the things she missed most about having her mother around. Angel for short. Angel went into her pokeball after another failed bonding attempt that had Calista stumped. She promised the ball she would figure it out; that they would have a relationship like she saw trainers everywhere experiencing with their pokemon. After all, that bond ... that was the reason she had left home in the first place. If she couldn't find that, was there any real point in not being back home with her family, failing at showing strength and being painfully bored of the daily grind? What else was there?
One day she will return home with a team of six towering behemoths and a fistful of shining Gym badges, and she will see the look in her brothers' eyes she always, always wanted to see when they were growing up together. Respect.
The thought makes her smile sometimes in her sleep.
Another dream of hers, and something rather easier to accomplish, is to have a Rapidash of her own. She has to date never seen a bond as sweet and strong as the bond between her mother and her pokemon, and believes that she is destined to have something similarly beautiful one day with her own perfect Ponyta.
Inventory
Dians:
18,027Items:
3x Pokéball
1x Soothe Bell1x Train Ticket
5x Tasty EXP Cookie17x Cheap EXP Cookie
1x Gourmet EXP Cookie
2x Black Sludge
TM Sludge Bomb
TM Hidden Power
TM Toxic
TM Mimic
Top Hat Accessory
1x Awakening
1x Ice Heal
1x Potion
1x Revive
1x Great Ball
1x Ultra Ball
1x Super Repel
1x Max Repel
5x Red Apricorn
Key Items:
PokéDex
Journal
HolocasterTrainer Advancement
| AP Category | Tier 0 | Tier 1 | Tier 2 | Tier 3 | Tier 4 | Tier 5 |
| Seeing the Sights: | 15/15 | 15/15 | 0/20 | 0/20 | 0/25 | 0/30 |
| Making Friends: | 15/15 | 15/15 | 5/20 | 0/20 | 0/25 | 0/30 |
| Green Thumb: | 0/15 | 0/15 | 0/20 | 0/20 | 0/25 | 0/30 |
| To Be The Best: | 15/15 | 0/15 | 0/20 | 0/20 | 0/25 | 0/30 |
| Silver Tongue: | 9/15 | 0/15 | 0/20 | 0/20 | 0/25 | 0/30 |
| Nursing: | 15/15 | 1/15 | 0/20 | 0/20 | 0/25 | 0/30 |
| Gift Giving: | 0/20 | 0/20 | 0/25 | 0/25 | 0/30 | 0/35 |
| Parental Instincts: | 0/20 | 0/20 | 0/25 | 0/25 | 0/30 | 0/35 |
| Genetic Key: | 0/20 | 0/20 | 0/25 | 0/25 | 0/30 | 0/35 |
| TLC: | 10/25 | 0/25 | 0/30 | 0/30 | 0/35 | 0/40 |
| Technology Buff: | 0/25 | 0/25 | 0/30 | 0/30 | 0/35 | 0/40 |
| Oooh Shiny: | 0/30 | 0/30 | 0/35 | 0/35 | 0/40 | 0/45 |
| Dedication: | 5/5 | 10/10 | 0/15 | 0/20 | 0/25 | 0/30 |
Pokemon
Total EXP Gained: 91
| Pokemon | |
|---|---|
 Salandit Caught at Level 5 Nickname: Angel Gender: Female Type: Poison/Fire Ability: Corrosion Height: 2'0" Weight: 10.6lbs Health: Low EXP Rate: Medium Fast EXP Gauge: (123/136) EXP Gained: 116 Level: 22 Division: D8 Total Stats: 242
Vitamins Used: None | Moveset: 1. Scratch 1. Poison Gas 5. Ember 8. Sweet Scent 13. Dragon Rage 16. Smog 21. Double Slap Unique Moves: - - - - Item: |
 Vulpix Caught at Level 7 Nickname: Puck Gender: Male Type: Ice Ability: Snow Warning Height: 1'9" Weight: 13lbs Health: Scrawny EXP Rate: Medium Fast EXP Gauge: (55/64) EXP Gained: 43 Level: 16 Division: D8 Total Stats: 176
Vitamins Used: None | Moveset: 1. Powder Snow 3. Tail Whip 7. Roar 7. Mist 9. Baby-Doll Eyes 10. Ice Shard 12. Confuse Ray 15. Icy Wind Unique Moves: - Freeze Dry (Egg Move) Item: |
{PC}Empty!
Journal
Oil and Water -- +1 Soothe Bell + 1,028 +29 Exp to Angel +19 AP
Stocking Up -
600, + 3x Potion
Bug Out -- +62 EXP, + 5783, +59 AP, +1 Train Ticket.
Summer Solstice 2019 -- + 10,816
TOTM Cookies -- + Tasty EXP Cookie x4
A Little Living -- + *dian*4775, +47 AP, +68 EXP, +1
Egg Move Voucher
July Delimas -- -*dian*10,400, +17x Cheap Exp Cookie, Gourmet Exp Cookie, Black Sludge x2, Great Capture Package, TM Sludge Bomb, Ultra Capture Package, TM Mimic, TM Toxic, Glittery Top Hat Accessory, TM Hidden Power, Tasty Exp Cookie, Small First Aid Package
—
1,028 +29 Exp to Angel +19 APStocking Up -
600, + 3x PotionBug Out -- +62 EXP, +
5783, +59 AP, +1 Train Ticket.Summer Solstice 2019 -- +
10,816TOTM Cookies -- + Tasty EXP Cookie x4
A Little Living -- + *dian*4775, +47 AP, +68 EXP, +1
Egg Move VoucherJuly Delimas -- -*dian*10,400, +17x Cheap Exp Cookie, Gourmet Exp Cookie, Black Sludge x2, Great Capture Package, TM Sludge Bomb, Ultra Capture Package, TM Mimic, TM Toxic, Glittery Top Hat Accessory, TM Hidden Power, Tasty Exp Cookie, Small First Aid Package
—
