Post by RIN COOPER on May 20, 2011 14:01:56 GMT -5
RIN COOPER
I keep my feet on solid ground, and use my wings when storms come around. I keep my feet on solid ground for freedom.
You're free but in your mind, your freedom's in a bind
• • HOPE YOU GOT YOUR THINGS TOGETHER,
hope you are quite prepared to die
FULL NAME: Ariana Dawn Cooper
NICKNAME: Rin
AGE: 21
BIRTHDATE: October 8
SPECIES: Human: Psychic
GENDER: Female
ORIENTATION: Straight, not that she's ever given it much thought.
OCCUPATION: Waitress
• • LOOKS LIKE WE'RE IN FOR NASTY WEATHER,
one eye is taken for an eye
FACE CLAIM: Daveigh Chase
SKIN: Pale to rosy
HAIR: Reddish brown, wavy and worn long
EYES: Dark blue
HEIGHT: 5'7"
WEIGHT: 127 lb.
OVERALL APPEARANCE: Rin looks like the girl you couldn't date (or couldn't be) in high school, and she knows it, and she uses it. It's something about the combination of a figure that's all curves and long lines with the face that's still babydoll-pretty even as she leaves her teens. Wide-cheeked and wide-eyed, with shallow dimples at either corner of her mouth that give her smiles an impish curve, Rin looks like jailbait even though she isn't any more.
Rather than fighting that look, she's embraced it. She keeps her brown hair long and wavy and while she dresses practically for work, outside the restaurant she favors a modern Lolita look. Not Gothic Lolita, she finds that whole trend hilarious. Less Visual Kei, more Nabokov. Short lightweight dresses, sometimes with a fifties silhouette or high-waisted sundresses. She wears ribbons in her hair sometimes, not actually childlike but evoking the same idea, and she actually owns not one but three pairs of heart-shaped sunglasses.
• • DON'T GO AROUND TONIGHT,
well, it's bound to take your life
LIKES:
- Comfort food
- Angry Chick Music
- Cats
- Christian Louboutin shoes
- Rain
- Breath Savers Vanilla Mint candies
- Gadgety phones (especially hers)
- Running
- Old cars (again, especially hers)
- Top Gear
DISLIKES:
- Food fried in old oil
- Reality shows
- Hot weather
- Heavily 'perfumey' smells
- Lizards. Ugh.
- Televised sports
- Entitlement
- Politics
- Bombastic music
- Novels too busy being artsy to tell a good story.
STRENGTHS: Some of Rin's strengths come from the same places as her weaknesses. She's supremely self-confident, and can bold-face her way through a lot of situations that ought to be beyond her just by sticking her chin in the air and brazening it out. It helps that she has good people-sense, she reads people well and can nudge a social situation to get things her way. She's smart, tested well in school though she never went to college, but more to the point Rin is tremendously practical. This is an effect of how she was raised; her mother scrapped for every single thing she ever got in her life and the greatest virtues in Randy's eyes were practicality and self-reliance. Rin internalized those lessons well, and now if she can't earn something herself, she'll do without it and never regret the lack. If wishes were horses, right?
WEAKNESSES: The biggest and most dangerous is that Rin is ignorant about the supernatural world but thinks that she knows it all. She only recently learned that demons and angels exist and are moving around in the world, she knows a bit about ghosts, but she doesn't understand things half as well as she thinks she does, and the cockiness may well get her killed. And much as she enjoys her wanderings, her rootlessness makes her vulnerable to all sorts of possible badness.
She's also inexperienced with violence or combat, with a decent theoretical understanding of how she'd get herself out of a bad situation but almost no practical experience outside the shooting range, dojo, or the practices she runs in her bedroom. She's strongly attached to her family, which seems like a strength but it makes it ridiculously easy to manipulate her--so much as hint at harming her parents or sister and she gets completely irrational. In the same vein, Rin's self-confident, which is good, but it crosses the line into being cocky, and that's dangerous. She thinks she can handle anything the world throws at her, and someday something's going to burst her bubble. Hopefully she'll survive when that happens.
FEARS: Hands down, her biggest fear is something happening to her mother. Rin might even claim that her greatest fear is somebody finding out about her ability and shipping her off to some lab to study like a rat, but in truth that pales beside what it would do to her if something bad ever happened to her Mommy. Beyond that, she has some fairly typical fears, things like lizards, earthquakes, and drowning.
POWERS & ABILITIES: Small-scale Telekinesis: Rin can move objects with the power of her mind. Small objects. Small, lightweight objects. Nothing heavier than two pounds or larger than a single square foot, and honestly her control gets shaky even at that size--she's better off sticking to objects weighing half a pound or less and smaller than a softball.
With great concentration, she can control multiple objects at once, but only as long as they don't total more than the weight or size limit laid out, and it's hard thinking about multiple things at once; she's got problems keeping control when playing with more than one object. Her power doesn't extend to great distances--sixty or seventy feet is the most she's ever managed and she's better off sticking to objects within twenty feet of her.
OVERALL PERSONALITY: Confident to the point of being brash, outgoing and chrarming but private about the things that really matter. Rin's mother used to call her 'Candide' sometimes, which nickname she didn't manage to resent until she was fourteen and read the book for the first time. But it's true, the girl is an optimist all the way down to her bones. More, she's a clear-eyed optimist: she sees the pain and horror and sadness of the world, and understands it, and is happy anyway. Maybe this comes out of how she was raised; Randy was a firm believer in the old saw that nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent, and she expanded it to apply to a lot of other things as well. Nobody can make Rin unhappy without her consent.
Not that she's without her unlovely side. Rin's spoiled, within a certain definition of the term. She's eight years younger than her stepsister, her mother's only biological child, and the baby of both sides of her family. As she got older and there was more money than there had been when she was a little kid, her parents were careful not to lavish her with material things, even if her stepdad sometimes wanted to, but Rin's definitely used to getting a lot of attention from the people in her life. In relationships--familial, friendly, or romantic--she's high-maintenance and has jealous tendencies. Only one boyfriend has ever dared to cheat on her, and she made his life a living hell for two years before she felt vindicated enough to move on.
On the other hand, she's just as loyal to others as she expects them to be to her. People say things like '[she'd] give you the shirt off [her] back', but in Rin's case it's more practical and direct than that. If Rin cares about you she will help you move, babysit your kids, drive forty miles in the middle of the night to pick you up because your car broke down. She'll clean your house when you're sick and lie bald-faced to anyone including the police to get you out of trouble. She'll help you break the law and though the need has never arisen it's more than likely that she would kill and die for you.
• • THERE'S A BAD MOON ON THE RISE,
don't go around tonight
HISTORY: Randy Cooper got pregnant at sixteen and was promptly dumped by her hard-rocking twenty year old boyfriend and kicked out of the house by her ultraconservative parents. It's the kind of story that far too often ends in tragedy, but Randy was both lucky and stubborn. She was taken in by a friend's parents long enough for them to help her run through an accelerated program to get her GED and after the baby was born to find a cheap apartment and a job as a prep cook in a local restaurant while baby Ariana was in free day care at the local Presbyterian church.
It was hard, very hard, but Randy finished her GED and even went on to get an Associates at the local community college in Restaurant Management. By the time that Rin was in kindergarten and Randy was old enough to buy beer, Randy was managing the bar and grill that she'd started off chopping onions at and they were living in a small but comfortable HUD townhouse. Life still wasn't easy, but they were off food stamps and had a real life for themselves.
When Rin was seven and Randy was 24, a restaurant customer named Oscar Delgado struck up a conversation with Randy and asked her out on a date. Randy refused, and Oscar nodded pleasantly, left a big tip for his meal of a plain cheeseburger and side salad with thousand island, and left. Three days later he was back. Another cheeseburger and salad with thousand, another proposal for a date, another refusal. And then four days later he was back again. This went on for five months. Twice a week, regular as clockwork, Oscar came in for the exact same meal, asked Randy out and got shot down. Finally he wore her down and she agreed to one date, just one, if he'd promise never to ask again. They were married eight months later.
It was a turning point in Rin's life in a lot of ways. Oscar is almost fifteen years older than Randy, and was a widower with a teenaged daughter of his own when the two met. He owns a small architectural firm and as the blended family came together all of a sudden there was a lot more money than there had ever been before. Rin barely remembers being on welfare, but it marked Randy deeply and even today Rin's mother isn't totally adjusted to the idea that she doesn't have to count every dime.
Rin adores her stepfather and considers him her 'real' Dad. She idolizes her big sister Mari, has done since the day she met her. And she and her mother fought like cats and dogs from the moment Rin hit menarche until about the time she graduated from high school. Oscar claims not to know how everyone survived those years, and it was certainly awfully noisy in the big faux Queen Anne house in the St. Louis suburbs. Rin and Randy fought constantly, there were weekly screaming matches and near-daily tears as they battled out everything from whether Rin was going to keep working in the restaurant that Randy had bought after the original owners retired (she was, Randy won that round) to whether Rin was entitled to a car at sixteen (Rin won that one, backed by Oscar) to the rules of dating (a draw, Rin got to date but her curfew and check-in rules were so restrictive that teen pregnancy became not only a non-issue but a near impossibility).
The truth is, the real root of most of Rin's and Randy's problems through Rin's teen years was the telekinesis. Yes, Randy was psychotically overprotective and so paranoid that Rin would end up knocked up the way she had that if chastity belts were legal she might have considered it. But mostly it was the psychic thing. Randy hates and fears her minor telekinetic ability and never uses it, and when Rin manifested the same ability at puberty it sent their relationship into a tailspin. One of the only real fights Rin remembers her mother and Oscar ever having was when Oscar found out that his wife had never told him about her ability. He wasn't mad about the telekinesis itself, it was the deception that bothered him. Years of battling, and it still basically came to an impasse between mother and daughter. Randy still hates and fears her own ability, refuses to use it, and is uncomfortable if Rin uses her own power when they're together. Rin sorta thinks TK is awesome and practices with hers constantly, always looking for another cool thing to do with it though she's discreet about using it in public.
Somehow they got through it, and by the time Rin finished high school the family was peaceful again. College was never particularly in the cards, she certainly could have gotten in if she'd wanted but Rin has known for years that she wasn't cut out for the academic life. None of the professions interest her, every time she looks through lists of college majors she just doesn't find anything that tugs at her. All she really wants to do is travel. She read On the Road at the exact right (or wrong) age and has daydreamed for years about drifting around the country having adventures. Her Mom thinks it's ridiculous and a waste of time, but Rin found an ally in Oscar, who thinks that it will be a good experience for her and help her figure out what she wants in life.
And so after spending an extra year living at home and pulling long shifts waiting tables and working the line at the restaurant, Rin saved up enough to head out on her own personal Kerouac walkabout. She rolls into a town, gets a room at a cheap motel, and spends a week looking for a job waiting tables. If she gets one, she stays long enough to feel like she's seen what she wants to about the area. If she doesn't, she moves on. In the course of her travels, she's bumped into the world of hunters, demons, and creatures once or twice. Not often enough to actually understand it, but often enough to think she does, which is almost certainly going to get her in trouble at some point.
She's been wandering for almost a year now, and despite her stepfather's predictions she hasn't gotten tired of it yet. It might happen someday, but so far she's still loving this vagabond life.
• • WELL, IT'S BOUND TO TAKE YOUR LIFE,
there's a bad moon on the rise
ALIAS: Briar
OTHER ACCOUNTS: None yet, but it's only a matter of time.
EXPERIENCE: 15+ years (seriously, I'm so old.)
WHERE DID YOU FIND US: Caution
ROLEPLAY SAMPLE:
Rin was practicing. If there was anyone outside her immediate family who knew that Rin was a telekinetic, that hypothetical person might be surprised by just how often and how assiduously Rin practiced with her ability. She seemed so flighty and flippant about everything, anyone could be forgiven for thinking that she was nothing but another boy-crazy young girl with a quirky style and a lucky tweak of genetics. But actually Rin took her telekinesis incredibly seriously, she was always looking for new things to do with it and working to master her control.
And so she was sitting crosslegged on her motel room bed wearing a crisp red and white cotton sundress with a silk daisy tucked into her hair and a pair of designer pumps sitting next to the bed while she'd slipped them off, her eyes intent as she maintained nine one-inch steel ball bearings that were orbiting around her in a perfect ellipse. The point was to keep them all moving at the same speed, all perfectly even along their canted orbit, all the same distance apart. This was an exercise of precision, not strength, and even as her phone rang Rin didn't stop right away. Just hit the button and held it up to her ear without looking away from the ball bearings as they moved around her.
"Hi Mom, sorry I missed you earlier. Did you get my message?" It was harder, keeping her concentration like this, but a good test of how her control was progressing. "The drive was fine. It's only four hundred fifty miles and--" she broke off, eyes rolling upward as she listened. "Yes, I stopped for breaks. I called you from Dayton, remember?" For all the exasperation in her voice, Rin was smiling fondly as her mother rambled on, demanding reassurances about each and every aspect of the trip out from Indiana. Randy would calm down in a week or two, but she always got like this right when Rin headed to a new town.
As she started slowing down the the ball bearings, meaning to unwind them from their orbital path and drop them back into the tupperware bowl she kept them in Rin said, "Mom, can you put Dad on, please?" A pause, her smile grew. "Love you too. And Mom, I--" she broke off on a shriek of outrage and there came the uneven pattering sound of steel balls falling to the floor in an uncontrolled rain, "I have plenty of birth control, will you just put Dad on?" And still, despite the real annoyance at her mother bringing it up for the millionth time, Rin was smiling as she finally got her Dad onto the phone.
