Oscar Merrit
Mar 11, 2019 16:50:26 GMT -8
Post by curiositybroughtit on Mar 11, 2019 16:50:26 GMT -8
Trainer Profile
.: Character Name :.
Oscar Charles Merrit
.: Character Name :.
Oscar Charles Merrit
.: Gender :. Male .: Age :. 28 .: Nickname :. Ozzie | .: Hometown :. Aurmouth City - S. Godai .: Trainer Class :. Cryptozoologist | .: Birthday :. February 28th .: Speech :. #AAF5A3 .: Zodiac :. Entwickson Munchlax |
{Appearance}
.:Appearance:.
.: Height :. 6'8" .: Weight :. 229 lbs .: Eyes :. His upturned eyes are hooded and wide set. Ozzie always wears his glasses, being badly nearsighted and basically blind without them. Behind his glasses, his eyes appear smaller than what they are; his glasses also disguise his eyes devouring details, cataloging them for later review. Ozzie's light brown eyes appear almost honey colored when the light hits them. .: Hair :. Ozzie’s thick, black hair falls limply on his head, fighting whatever style Ozzie attempts to put it in. He generally tried to keep it in a side swept look. His hair is often cut to two inches, but his hair grows quickly and always manages to be half an inch longer than Ozzie prefers. His hair is straight. .: General Appearance :. The scent of sunscreen tends to linger around Ozzie, as his pale skin burns easily, especially in the high altitudes he frequented as a student. A childhood injury left his leg with a massive scar and took a chunk out of calf, leaving Ozzie with a limp. He’s learned to work around it, as best he can, but he still prefers to move at a slow, steady pace and avoids running where possibly. His leg tends to stiffen up in the cold; he also sticks closer to Treble in cold weather. In spite of the injury, Ozzie learned to be light on his feet, able to get close to wild pokemon. As a cryptozoologist it became important for him to move quietly. As such, combined with his height and broad-shouldered, sturdy frame, Ozzie tends to silently loom up on people; for the most part, Ozzie tends to enjoy their reactions. Years in his job as geologist and months spent traveling on the road have left him toned. His long torso almost belies his height, making him appear a few inches shorter, but does nothing for having to duck through low doorway and short ceilings. For all that his mother would cry over the state of his calloused hands, Ozzie keeps himself impeccably groomed—clean shaven; clean, neatly cut nails—even on the road; he simply doesn’t feel clean otherwise. |  .: Clothing/Accessories :. Well acquainted with fashion, mostly from his mother's insistence that he and his sister always be impeccably dressed, most of Ozzie's current wardrobe is made up of shirts and jeans that in another life might have cost a small fortune, but travel, rough handling, and neglect relegated them to stray threads and poorly sewn on patches. Ozzie does keep his heavy hiking boots in good condition and a carefully packed pair of dress shoes at the bottom of his large, blue backpack. Ozzie gets cold easily and so often wears his longsleeved button-ups under a variety of once brand name shirts or vests; even in warmer weather, Ozzie prefers to wear long-sleeves too short: they're professional and protect his arms. He prefers cooler and softer shades of red, blue, green and brown, with the occasional splash of orange or yellow, but avoids grey and purple when he can. He owns a beat up knee length brown trench coat, with a jumble of pockets filled with a variety of pens (most don't work) and scraps of paper, film, trinkets and souvenirs. A large section of his backpack is dedicated to notebooks in various states of well being, with many suffering from water damage and the occasional burn, and what, several years ago, would have been a state of the art camera and video camera. |
{Personality}
.:Personality:.
Ozzie, the born extrovert, loves every moment spent in the company of other people. If he can't spend time with them in person, he'll call them over the Holocaster. Traveling without the constant companionship of fellow geologists and other workers, Ozzie suffers from the occasional bout of loneliness. His overall demeanor is easy-going, amicable and approachable expressed by his warm smiles, friendly overtures, and a voice tinted with delight. The years spent in grandmother's parlor left Ozzie with old-fashioned mannerisms, social niceties, and decent listening skills.
He rarely forgets a name of a face and greets people that he's only met once or twice before as old friends. His enthusiasm can be off-putting for some, especially when it comes to talking about his rocks or his research in cryptozoology. Ozzie's willing to lend an ear to others' problems but is reticent about his own. He enjoys treating friends, or strangers who might soon become friends, out to a dinner or show or concert.
When angered or stressed, Ozzie avoids arguments and takes the time to step out and cool down, but some find his habit of walking out of difficult conversations with a bad excuse irritating. Perhaps because of his own temper, burning and brimming with cutting and uncaring words, Ozzie is overly generous with second chances, often rationalizing the bad actions of others. He believes that people are generally good and have good reasons for the things they do. While Ozzie is perceptive enough in his chosen fields, this tendency leads him to being manipulated easily.
His background in geology left with a methodical way of approaching the world: hypothesize, observe, collect evidence, conclude. All data is valuable in his line of work, and it's not uncommon to find him clipping articles from tabloids and scouring newspapers. He thinks poorly of people who dismiss the existence of cryptids out of hand simply because it hasn't been proven yet. Even worse are those who fabricate and falsify evidence; it's one of the few things he won't tolerate. Despite this, Ozzie himself is prone to over exaggerating and overstating what little data there is if it falls in line with what he believes to be true.
After working at a family company for several years, Ozzie enjoys the the time he has to relax and has begun to relearn his love for rocks again without the stacks of paperwork he'd learned to associate with it. Not to say that Ozzie doesn't miss his lab. He does; he misses it the same way he misses the creature comforts of the city, with its abundance of company, good food and music, the latest books, and a comfortable, dry bed at night. But the wilderness, with its craggy rock faces, river worn ground, bluffs of slate or limestone, the wind eroded dirt of the plains: these are things Ozzie loves. And after the cave-in that nearly cost him a life and did take Peter, Ozzie promised himself that he'd pursue the thing he loved.
Ozzie won't shy away from physical danger and willingly puts his body and life at risk for that one photograph, charging off into the unknown. Perhaps his internship collecting lava samples numbed what survival instincts he'd been born with. He's still cautious, sometimes overly so, in pokemon battles, but Ozzie is slowing growing more comfortable in his role as a trainer. He'll likely stay a more defensive trainer as it gives more time to think and analyze.
He loves the greasy, fried food that sticks to the ribs, but he loves trying new cuisine and restaurants, especially those small, hole-in-the-wall type places and drags whoever he can convince to accompany him. He doesn't care for sweet things. He picked up chess in college, along with a variety of card games, particularly those that rely more on strategy than luck. He's loved reading horror novels since he way a young child, and especially loves reading them to other people. Despite nearly always being cold, Ozzie hates hate as he finds too suffocating and oppressive. He used to spelunking with Peter, rock collecting and observing that natural and pokemon carved formations in the rock, but he's avoided caverns ever since the accident.
Highly intelligent, Ozzie possesses a wealth of knowledge about geology and cryptozoology. He is very self away that he doesn't know everything but is always ready to learn something new. He becomes very focused and sticks to a project like a fly in honey, especially when things just do not make sense.
Ozzie doesn't concern himself with current politics, not unless they would interfere with him or his research. Perhaps this comes from a certain belief that the law should work for and not the other way around. Ozzie possesses the casual arrogance and thoughtlessness that comes from being raised in a wealthy family. Ozzie isn't great with money; it could, in fact, be said he's quite terrible with it.
He spoils his own pokemon with expensive treats and days out at the groomers; he invents little games to play with them that have relatively little to do with training. If their trainers allow it--or if they’re not paying attention--he’ll slip their pokemon treats too. He doesn’t find ordinary pokemon quite as interesting as he does his cryptids, especially after a wild murkrow made off with his glasses, or the more than one occasion where his quarry was just in range, he was sure, before something startled it away. More often than Ozzie would care to admit, ordinary wild pokemon turn out to be at the heart of rumors he’s tracked down, but they’re almost as fascinating to him in their own right.
He rarely forgets a name of a face and greets people that he's only met once or twice before as old friends. His enthusiasm can be off-putting for some, especially when it comes to talking about his rocks or his research in cryptozoology. Ozzie's willing to lend an ear to others' problems but is reticent about his own. He enjoys treating friends, or strangers who might soon become friends, out to a dinner or show or concert.
When angered or stressed, Ozzie avoids arguments and takes the time to step out and cool down, but some find his habit of walking out of difficult conversations with a bad excuse irritating. Perhaps because of his own temper, burning and brimming with cutting and uncaring words, Ozzie is overly generous with second chances, often rationalizing the bad actions of others. He believes that people are generally good and have good reasons for the things they do. While Ozzie is perceptive enough in his chosen fields, this tendency leads him to being manipulated easily.
His background in geology left with a methodical way of approaching the world: hypothesize, observe, collect evidence, conclude. All data is valuable in his line of work, and it's not uncommon to find him clipping articles from tabloids and scouring newspapers. He thinks poorly of people who dismiss the existence of cryptids out of hand simply because it hasn't been proven yet. Even worse are those who fabricate and falsify evidence; it's one of the few things he won't tolerate. Despite this, Ozzie himself is prone to over exaggerating and overstating what little data there is if it falls in line with what he believes to be true.
After working at a family company for several years, Ozzie enjoys the the time he has to relax and has begun to relearn his love for rocks again without the stacks of paperwork he'd learned to associate with it. Not to say that Ozzie doesn't miss his lab. He does; he misses it the same way he misses the creature comforts of the city, with its abundance of company, good food and music, the latest books, and a comfortable, dry bed at night. But the wilderness, with its craggy rock faces, river worn ground, bluffs of slate or limestone, the wind eroded dirt of the plains: these are things Ozzie loves. And after the cave-in that nearly cost him a life and did take Peter, Ozzie promised himself that he'd pursue the thing he loved.
Ozzie won't shy away from physical danger and willingly puts his body and life at risk for that one photograph, charging off into the unknown. Perhaps his internship collecting lava samples numbed what survival instincts he'd been born with. He's still cautious, sometimes overly so, in pokemon battles, but Ozzie is slowing growing more comfortable in his role as a trainer. He'll likely stay a more defensive trainer as it gives more time to think and analyze.
He loves the greasy, fried food that sticks to the ribs, but he loves trying new cuisine and restaurants, especially those small, hole-in-the-wall type places and drags whoever he can convince to accompany him. He doesn't care for sweet things. He picked up chess in college, along with a variety of card games, particularly those that rely more on strategy than luck. He's loved reading horror novels since he way a young child, and especially loves reading them to other people. Despite nearly always being cold, Ozzie hates hate as he finds too suffocating and oppressive. He used to spelunking with Peter, rock collecting and observing that natural and pokemon carved formations in the rock, but he's avoided caverns ever since the accident.
Highly intelligent, Ozzie possesses a wealth of knowledge about geology and cryptozoology. He is very self away that he doesn't know everything but is always ready to learn something new. He becomes very focused and sticks to a project like a fly in honey, especially when things just do not make sense.
Ozzie doesn't concern himself with current politics, not unless they would interfere with him or his research. Perhaps this comes from a certain belief that the law should work for and not the other way around. Ozzie possesses the casual arrogance and thoughtlessness that comes from being raised in a wealthy family. Ozzie isn't great with money; it could, in fact, be said he's quite terrible with it.
He spoils his own pokemon with expensive treats and days out at the groomers; he invents little games to play with them that have relatively little to do with training. If their trainers allow it--or if they’re not paying attention--he’ll slip their pokemon treats too. He doesn’t find ordinary pokemon quite as interesting as he does his cryptids, especially after a wild murkrow made off with his glasses, or the more than one occasion where his quarry was just in range, he was sure, before something startled it away. More often than Ozzie would care to admit, ordinary wild pokemon turn out to be at the heart of rumors he’s tracked down, but they’re almost as fascinating to him in their own right.
{History}
His parents had also shortlisted a group of other young children--the sons and daughters of other like minded families--who were considered to be acceptable peers. One girl in particular, a year younger than Ozzie, grew attached, and the two possessed a passion for reading horror stories in the library to each other, and scaring the other children with them.
.:History:.
The firstborn child of an only child in a wealthy family, nothing about Ozzie's childhood was left to chance. His parents had planned everything down to the last minute detail; his birth itself was attended to by the best physicians money could procure in a small, exclusive hospital on the outskirts of Aurmouth City. They had already put his name down for private preschool, and arranged for a set of tutors to take over his classical education. A Merritt, Ozzie learned, must be meritorious in all he or she does. Ozzie, while an intelligent child, could only muster a very average performance in the subjects he didn't fail at completely; when it didn't like Ozzie would become a prodigy at something, his parents fired the tutor and found a new one; his parents never allowed Ozzie the time to learn, let alone excel at, any of the subjects his tutors taught. They hid their disappointment well, and it wouldn't be until Ozzie was a young teenager that he began to feel the weight of it and did their best to be there for him, often canceling or pushing back appointments and meetings in order to attend this play or that spelling bee.His parents had also shortlisted a group of other young children--the sons and daughters of other like minded families--who were considered to be acceptable peers. One girl in particular, a year younger than Ozzie, grew attached, and the two possessed a passion for reading horror stories in the library to each other, and scaring the other children with them.
His childhood home, or at least the home he spent the most time growing up in, was a large village on the coast, separated from the ocean by a wide out of the way beach, a ten minute's walk from a, pier. Ozzie, Penny, and occasionally the other children would often go up and down the beach, sometimes mixing with the other children, and other times going to vicious war with them. Ozzie tended to try and get everyone to join in on one game, but it was moot point when a game of hide and seek could turn into a game of war.
By the time Ozzie turned six, his parents had given up on private education, and ensured he was enrolled in the local primary school. School itself wasn't difficult, and Ozzie found himself able to understand better when he had the time to focus, when he wasn't being shunted from one teacher to the next.
His mother became pregnant with his baby sister after Ozzie had turned eight. His grandfather, in an effort to distract Ozzie, took him out on the small boat like his grandfather's father had done when he had been a boy. With his small collection of water pokemon, his grandfather could often identify the wild ones by their shape beneath the waves, and he would point them out to Ozzie and challenge him to identify them himself. On an early, misty morning Ozzie spotted something in the water he didn't recognize. He leaned over the size for a better look and feel out of the boat. Before his grandfather could stop the boat, and his grandfather's magikarp put himself in harm's way to pull him out, the motor had bit into Ozzie's leg.
Ozzie doesn't remember very much of what happened after. Only that his leg hurt, and his mother hadn't come to see him. As he became more conscious and aware, he found himself overwhelmed by an overly apologetic grandfather (nagging) grandmother and overworked PAs and the rare business person coming in to check on him. As it turned out, his sister had been born in the interim, and his parents were busy with the baby at home and took turned to come and see him. Still, young and spoiled as he was, Ozzie couldn't help but be a little resentful of baby Elisabeth.
The next months were torture for what had once been a very active child, cooped up in bed with a leg that wouldn't work right. The doctor said he was very lucky, before his Chansey patted Ozzie's head and tried to feed him a lollipop. Bored with what his teacher's sent home to him, Ozzie would boot up his computer, and scour the internet for information about the strange creature he'd seen in the water. His science teacher had shown them how to find information on the internet, and Ozzie put to it use in his own research. He was eventually drawn to a number of poorly coded sites, with first hand accounts (primary accounts were important, his teacher had said), and any number of collections of photographs of strange pokemon, including some that looked like the one he'd seen in the water. When not stuck in bed, Ozzie spent time in his grandmother's parlor, and she subscribed to magazines that contained even stranger stories; she said not to take them too seriously, but would read them to Ozzie nonetheless as it distracted him from the lingering pain.
His leg injury healed, and as Ozzie went through rehabilitation, eventually he could walk on it, but the limp never went away. The parents of some of his friends', the ones his parents had chosen for Ozzie, didn't say anything directly, but quietly stopped inviting Ozzie over, and issued excuses to avoid seeing Ozzie at any number of events he was old enough to attend. Penny, obstinate and attending the same school Ozzie did, didn't listen to her own parents, and told Ozzie she didn't care if his leg was bad and that he wouldn't be as fun to play with anymore. His parents invited some of their workers' children over, and Ozzie met Mort and his father for the first time.
Mort enjoyed the same horror stories, and the strange truths Ozzie was just beginning to discover about the world, and Ozzie, Mort, and Penny would often go out exploring and looking for monsters and haunts in the evenings before curfew. Mort's father, when he saw the children bring in a handful of rocks and become disappointed when they didn't have glimflies inside of them, introduced Ozzie and Penny, at least, to his own work. Ozzie ate up the stories that Mort's father told him about the rocks, and how those rocks could be used to tell stories about the land they belonged to. When he returned home and begged his family for books on geology, for all that his grandfather insisted that it was dirty work, they acquiesced. He wasn't happy about having a new sibling, and the strange stories he'd been regurgitating were not the sort of thing a proper Merritt would believe; they even offered Mort's father a generous raise if he would come in and teach the boy for a half day on weekends.
The older Ozzie grew, the more he resembled an overgrown bean sprout. His mother kept in clothes, but only just. Ozzie kept to his lessons with Mort's father, and eventually took the more specialized geology classes once he entered secondary school. He was even talked into spending some time with sister, who was already excelling at viola and mathematics according to their gushing parents; she very small, and breakable, and prone to crying, and Ozzie found her difficult to deal with.
Penny, and Ozzie and Mort in particular, grew closer as they grew older, too. Ozzie searched for strange and mysterious pokemon he'd read about in his magazines and blogs that he took care to hide from his parents; Mort and Penny hunting for pokemon in general. Penny told Ozzie in confidence that she wanted to be a trainer, maybe even a dark type gym leader, when she grew up, and not a lawyer like her father and siblings. Mort had told them both that he wanted to study aura theory. Ozzie, who had known that someday he would take over the Merritt family business, felt confused, but just told them he didn't know what he wanted to do when he grew up.
In the summer, the trio would haunt the beaches with the other children, playing in the water and feeding the winggulls and poking the dwebbles with sticks of varied length. When the water was too rough, or the sand pulled too much at Ozzie's leg, they'd go to the boardwalk and eat ice cream, or visit the shops in the city. In the autumn, once the weather had turned nippy, they'd haunt the library, and read books to each other, or look up reports of strange happenings in the newspaper archives, and play whatever the newest game on the market was. One autumn, when Ozzie was fourteen, he gathered up his courage and kissed Mort behind the school. The two went to school the next, a little nervous and embarrassed, but holding hands and happy.
That changed a few weeks later, however, when Mort dropped out of secondary school. He told Ozzie he'd already applied for his trainer's license, and asked Ozzie and Penny both to go with him. They could do great things together; Mort was sure.
Ozzie almost went with him. But he worried, too, and felt the weight of his family name weigh down on him. He wondered if Penny felt the same, if she would go, but then it wasn't a fair comparison; Penny was the youngest, and Penny had always meant to leave. The responsibility he felt toward his family made his decision for him, and Ozzie backed out at the last moment, and didn't apply for his license six months later. Ozzie still keeps in contact them to this day, but the frequency of the calls became once a month instead of twice a week, and the three became distant as the damage to the relationship had already been done.
Ozzie's passion for geology had naturally been indulged more than his passion for cryptids, as his family refused to discuss his other hobby in polite conversation. After Mort left, his parents found better tutors than Mort's father, and Ozzie's workload increased. His mother was the one who recommended that Ozzie pursue a degree and eventual phd in it; he could always be trained up for the company later. She was still young and healthy, after all, and his grandfather was as hale as a tauros. His grandfather wasn't happy, but allowed it.
At university, to his family's unknowing dismay, Ozzie met more people of a similar mindset: there were those interested in rocks and dirts, and the things that lived and had lived in them, as well as those people who haunted the same internet boards Ozzie did. Ozzie spent more time with the second group, who weren't as concerned with talking about school and studying and projects every day; sometimes they went camping, and sometimes they'd hop the fence and enter the orchards, ever looking for some hint of this or that pokemon. One of his new friends' pokemon, a numel, often sought Ozzie out whenever she was left to her own devices, after he began feeding her pomegranate seeds and purple carrots sent from home. Her trainer, Peter, was never very far behind, apologetic. He, too, studied paleobotany and stratigraphy, and the two often found themselves sharing classes.
By their junior year, Ozzie and Peter spent more time together, often going out on solo camping trips that served the dual purpose of meeting class requirements and hunting cryptid pokemon; the two shared a love for cave systems, and exploring them. Before the winter holidays, the two started dating. Ozzie's family was introduced to Peter with only a little trepidation, but they eventually granted their half-hearted approval.
After graduation, Ozzie's grandfather offered him a job at one of their daughter companies in Belieae, and Peter joined him there, working on a graduate degree at a local university. And life was good for awhile, until one day, while exploring a cave system on an expedition, a wild pokemon panicked and caused the cave wall to collapse. Ozzie thought he might die, trapped on the wrong side of the cave in, but rescuers and the expedition leader's onix rescued him and the few others he had been trapped with. Peter, however, had not been so fortunate. Either he'd struck his head, or something had struck him, but the result remained the same. Physically, the doctors said Peter was out of immediate danger, but as the days marched relentlessly into a week, and and the weeks into a month. Ozzie contacted his family, and Peter's, and they arranged to take Peter back home. His own family tried to comfort him, saying that of course Peter would come out of the coma, they just needed to hire better doctors. Peter's family was insistent and angry at Ozzie when he gave up. He'd researched comas, and eventually came to the conclusion that Peter's chances of waking up was infinitesimally small and came to slowly accept the fact that Peter was gone. But, their insistence on just waiting another day, that of course he'd wake up tomorrow, made the ordeal worse for Ozzie, and he slowly drew away from both families.
He formally resigned from his job, unable to stomach the thought of entering another a cave or mine. In the interim, he worked on gaining his trainer's license, in order to ensure nothing happened to Peter's numel, Treble. If he had to bend a few laws to do so, well, he couldn't risk losing her too. Before the accident, Ozzie and Peter had discussed eventually taking an early retirement, or a gap year, to pursue the blurry photographs, and the shaky first hand accounts, and the strange things that danced just out of sight, and bring them to the light of science, and Ozzie left to do just that. What was the point of waiting anymore?
Over a year later, Ozzie has started up his own website, monsmysterily, as a place to disseminate the evidence he collected, promote discussion, and find new leads for his work. One lead, a rumor, has led Ozzie to some strange footprints found in Kagereta Woods
By the time Ozzie turned six, his parents had given up on private education, and ensured he was enrolled in the local primary school. School itself wasn't difficult, and Ozzie found himself able to understand better when he had the time to focus, when he wasn't being shunted from one teacher to the next.
His mother became pregnant with his baby sister after Ozzie had turned eight. His grandfather, in an effort to distract Ozzie, took him out on the small boat like his grandfather's father had done when he had been a boy. With his small collection of water pokemon, his grandfather could often identify the wild ones by their shape beneath the waves, and he would point them out to Ozzie and challenge him to identify them himself. On an early, misty morning Ozzie spotted something in the water he didn't recognize. He leaned over the size for a better look and feel out of the boat. Before his grandfather could stop the boat, and his grandfather's magikarp put himself in harm's way to pull him out, the motor had bit into Ozzie's leg.
Ozzie doesn't remember very much of what happened after. Only that his leg hurt, and his mother hadn't come to see him. As he became more conscious and aware, he found himself overwhelmed by an overly apologetic grandfather (nagging) grandmother and overworked PAs and the rare business person coming in to check on him. As it turned out, his sister had been born in the interim, and his parents were busy with the baby at home and took turned to come and see him. Still, young and spoiled as he was, Ozzie couldn't help but be a little resentful of baby Elisabeth.
The next months were torture for what had once been a very active child, cooped up in bed with a leg that wouldn't work right. The doctor said he was very lucky, before his Chansey patted Ozzie's head and tried to feed him a lollipop. Bored with what his teacher's sent home to him, Ozzie would boot up his computer, and scour the internet for information about the strange creature he'd seen in the water. His science teacher had shown them how to find information on the internet, and Ozzie put to it use in his own research. He was eventually drawn to a number of poorly coded sites, with first hand accounts (primary accounts were important, his teacher had said), and any number of collections of photographs of strange pokemon, including some that looked like the one he'd seen in the water. When not stuck in bed, Ozzie spent time in his grandmother's parlor, and she subscribed to magazines that contained even stranger stories; she said not to take them too seriously, but would read them to Ozzie nonetheless as it distracted him from the lingering pain.
His leg injury healed, and as Ozzie went through rehabilitation, eventually he could walk on it, but the limp never went away. The parents of some of his friends', the ones his parents had chosen for Ozzie, didn't say anything directly, but quietly stopped inviting Ozzie over, and issued excuses to avoid seeing Ozzie at any number of events he was old enough to attend. Penny, obstinate and attending the same school Ozzie did, didn't listen to her own parents, and told Ozzie she didn't care if his leg was bad and that he wouldn't be as fun to play with anymore. His parents invited some of their workers' children over, and Ozzie met Mort and his father for the first time.
Mort enjoyed the same horror stories, and the strange truths Ozzie was just beginning to discover about the world, and Ozzie, Mort, and Penny would often go out exploring and looking for monsters and haunts in the evenings before curfew. Mort's father, when he saw the children bring in a handful of rocks and become disappointed when they didn't have glimflies inside of them, introduced Ozzie and Penny, at least, to his own work. Ozzie ate up the stories that Mort's father told him about the rocks, and how those rocks could be used to tell stories about the land they belonged to. When he returned home and begged his family for books on geology, for all that his grandfather insisted that it was dirty work, they acquiesced. He wasn't happy about having a new sibling, and the strange stories he'd been regurgitating were not the sort of thing a proper Merritt would believe; they even offered Mort's father a generous raise if he would come in and teach the boy for a half day on weekends.
The older Ozzie grew, the more he resembled an overgrown bean sprout. His mother kept in clothes, but only just. Ozzie kept to his lessons with Mort's father, and eventually took the more specialized geology classes once he entered secondary school. He was even talked into spending some time with sister, who was already excelling at viola and mathematics according to their gushing parents; she very small, and breakable, and prone to crying, and Ozzie found her difficult to deal with.
Penny, and Ozzie and Mort in particular, grew closer as they grew older, too. Ozzie searched for strange and mysterious pokemon he'd read about in his magazines and blogs that he took care to hide from his parents; Mort and Penny hunting for pokemon in general. Penny told Ozzie in confidence that she wanted to be a trainer, maybe even a dark type gym leader, when she grew up, and not a lawyer like her father and siblings. Mort had told them both that he wanted to study aura theory. Ozzie, who had known that someday he would take over the Merritt family business, felt confused, but just told them he didn't know what he wanted to do when he grew up.
In the summer, the trio would haunt the beaches with the other children, playing in the water and feeding the winggulls and poking the dwebbles with sticks of varied length. When the water was too rough, or the sand pulled too much at Ozzie's leg, they'd go to the boardwalk and eat ice cream, or visit the shops in the city. In the autumn, once the weather had turned nippy, they'd haunt the library, and read books to each other, or look up reports of strange happenings in the newspaper archives, and play whatever the newest game on the market was. One autumn, when Ozzie was fourteen, he gathered up his courage and kissed Mort behind the school. The two went to school the next, a little nervous and embarrassed, but holding hands and happy.
That changed a few weeks later, however, when Mort dropped out of secondary school. He told Ozzie he'd already applied for his trainer's license, and asked Ozzie and Penny both to go with him. They could do great things together; Mort was sure.
Ozzie almost went with him. But he worried, too, and felt the weight of his family name weigh down on him. He wondered if Penny felt the same, if she would go, but then it wasn't a fair comparison; Penny was the youngest, and Penny had always meant to leave. The responsibility he felt toward his family made his decision for him, and Ozzie backed out at the last moment, and didn't apply for his license six months later. Ozzie still keeps in contact them to this day, but the frequency of the calls became once a month instead of twice a week, and the three became distant as the damage to the relationship had already been done.
Ozzie's passion for geology had naturally been indulged more than his passion for cryptids, as his family refused to discuss his other hobby in polite conversation. After Mort left, his parents found better tutors than Mort's father, and Ozzie's workload increased. His mother was the one who recommended that Ozzie pursue a degree and eventual phd in it; he could always be trained up for the company later. She was still young and healthy, after all, and his grandfather was as hale as a tauros. His grandfather wasn't happy, but allowed it.
At university, to his family's unknowing dismay, Ozzie met more people of a similar mindset: there were those interested in rocks and dirts, and the things that lived and had lived in them, as well as those people who haunted the same internet boards Ozzie did. Ozzie spent more time with the second group, who weren't as concerned with talking about school and studying and projects every day; sometimes they went camping, and sometimes they'd hop the fence and enter the orchards, ever looking for some hint of this or that pokemon. One of his new friends' pokemon, a numel, often sought Ozzie out whenever she was left to her own devices, after he began feeding her pomegranate seeds and purple carrots sent from home. Her trainer, Peter, was never very far behind, apologetic. He, too, studied paleobotany and stratigraphy, and the two often found themselves sharing classes.
By their junior year, Ozzie and Peter spent more time together, often going out on solo camping trips that served the dual purpose of meeting class requirements and hunting cryptid pokemon; the two shared a love for cave systems, and exploring them. Before the winter holidays, the two started dating. Ozzie's family was introduced to Peter with only a little trepidation, but they eventually granted their half-hearted approval.
After graduation, Ozzie's grandfather offered him a job at one of their daughter companies in Belieae, and Peter joined him there, working on a graduate degree at a local university. And life was good for awhile, until one day, while exploring a cave system on an expedition, a wild pokemon panicked and caused the cave wall to collapse. Ozzie thought he might die, trapped on the wrong side of the cave in, but rescuers and the expedition leader's onix rescued him and the few others he had been trapped with. Peter, however, had not been so fortunate. Either he'd struck his head, or something had struck him, but the result remained the same. Physically, the doctors said Peter was out of immediate danger, but as the days marched relentlessly into a week, and and the weeks into a month. Ozzie contacted his family, and Peter's, and they arranged to take Peter back home. His own family tried to comfort him, saying that of course Peter would come out of the coma, they just needed to hire better doctors. Peter's family was insistent and angry at Ozzie when he gave up. He'd researched comas, and eventually came to the conclusion that Peter's chances of waking up was infinitesimally small and came to slowly accept the fact that Peter was gone. But, their insistence on just waiting another day, that of course he'd wake up tomorrow, made the ordeal worse for Ozzie, and he slowly drew away from both families.
He formally resigned from his job, unable to stomach the thought of entering another a cave or mine. In the interim, he worked on gaining his trainer's license, in order to ensure nothing happened to Peter's numel, Treble. If he had to bend a few laws to do so, well, he couldn't risk losing her too. Before the accident, Ozzie and Peter had discussed eventually taking an early retirement, or a gap year, to pursue the blurry photographs, and the shaky first hand accounts, and the strange things that danced just out of sight, and bring them to the light of science, and Ozzie left to do just that. What was the point of waiting anymore?
Over a year later, Ozzie has started up his own website, monsmysterily, as a place to disseminate the evidence he collected, promote discussion, and find new leads for his work. One lead, a rumor, has led Ozzie to some strange footprints found in Kagereta Woods
{Relationships}
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1,000 • Location: Scuparte Town, East Godai
5x Pokéball
PokéDex
Journal
Holocaster
#322
