Arista Whitman

From Greenthings

Revision as of 01:38, 19 June 2009

Attributes

Skills

Other Traits

Background Information

Appearance

Arista stands just under 5 feet 5 inches tall and is just a bit heavier than average -- an unfortunate side-effect to her high school diet of Chinese takeout and ice cream. Her hair is naturally light brown and wavy, but she keeps it cut in short layers, bleached white, and gelled. While Arista has an abnormally pale complexion even for living in Maine, the white color of her hair gives enough contrast to make her look slightly darker than she is. Her eyes are a dark hazel which, in the right light, look almost yellow.

Her wardrobe tends to vary from cargo pants and tank tops to leather skirts and corsets, but she is almost always seen in combat boots and some form of thick black eyeliner. While she doesn't tend to be what most people would describe as "pretty," it is evident that she spends a great deal of time on her appearance, and she does have a certain tendency to draw attention to herself -- whether she means to or not.

Backstory

Arista was born in Portland, ME. Her mother, Susan, worked long hours as a nurse at a local hospital, earning enough to give them only the necessities, mostly because of her mother's large student loans, credit card debts, mortgage, and other debts. While hard-working, Susan never particularly learned how to manage her money, which often caused problems for her and Arista. Susan tended to be both absent and absent-minded, leaving Arista to fend for herself the majority of the time. Arista doesn't complain about it. Much.

According to her mother, her father was a policeman who was shot on the job when she was a baby. Old family albums picture them as a normal, happy family. John Whitman, from all that Arista has been told, was "a model of fatherly perfection." He was a tall, portly man in his mid-thirties -- significantly older than her mother -- when he died, and Arista seems to believe that he was an alcoholic from the few times her mother has spoken candidly about him. Most of the time, however, Susan prefers to talk only of how wonderful he was, and how life would have been so much better with him, and how he's watching them from heaven.

The remainder of her family is rather estranged. Her mother was born in Massachusetts, so though she has a rather large and extensive family, Arista really only sees them every few years, and only with large amounts of protest. On her father's side, Arista's grandmother never particularly cared for her mother for reasons she never quite understood. The most extensive contact her grandmother has made with her was a small custody battle a year after her father's death. Her grandfather sends her birthday cards each year with a negligible amount of money on a Wal-Mart gift card, and as of recently they have exchanged a few emails. Between his arthritis and difficulty using a computer his emails tend to be short, but what he does say is usually snarky, half-senile, and complaining about his wife not letting him eat hamburgers anymore. Arista is quite fond of him.

Throughout her elementary school years, Arista was mostly a shy, quiet girl. However, puberty's onset combined with the horrors of middle school made her bolder. Arista learned to hide her feelings behind venom and sarcasm, which hardly endeared her to most of her teachers. However, in the eight grade, a young English teacher happened to read a poem that Arista wrote for a class assignment and asked to speak to her after class. She told Arista that she had a stunning way with words, and showed remarkable insight into Arista's psyche. Arista, of course, brushed it off and refused to talk about it, but it stuck with her.

Arista had only a handful of friends in high school and most of them fell by the wayside, but online blogging through Livejournal (among other things) managed to form for her some of the most solid friendships she has had so far. She still blogs fairly regularly, though her skills on the computer don't extend much beyond that.

Arista's high school group was, at first, the goth circle. While she enjoyed the constant mocking of the school's social structure and criticism of pop-culture, she found that there wasn't much tying them together beneath the snark and dark clothing. (Her moment of epiphany was when she tried to discuss the finer points of horror literature and the conversation was promptly derailed to talking about bad contemporary vampire fiction.) Sometime during her junior year, however, the co-captain of the Academic Team happened to be in a class with her. Impressed with her extensive knowledge of literary and mythological trivia, she was invited to the team. Arista spent the last two years of her high school life associating with nerdy anime-obsessed band-geeks, debating which of the Lord of the Rings fanfiction authors managed to write the best while making Tolkien roll over in his grave. She still has a few close friends whom she keeps contact with, mostly over Livejournal and Facebook.

Arista's life has been largely trauma-free, oddly enough, beyond the normal moody teenage things such as prying mothers, oppressive social structures, and working as a retail cashier. That is not to say that her life has been particularly happy, only that it hasn't been particularly abnormal. Any large abnormalities in her life, particularly those with occult ties, have been entirely self-inflicted. She has a weakness for ghost stories and myths, and enjoys nothing more than debunking local legends. While Arista does strongly believe in the occult, she's quite skeptical, and will be the first to admit that almost all reports are fake. (After all, most legitimate cases of the supernatural are covered up quite cleanly...)

Experience Point Expenditures

None yet.

Preferred Supernatural Templates

(In order of preference. :3)

1. Werewolf (Ithaeur)
2. Werewolf (Cahalith)
3. Mage (Moros)
4. Vampire (Mekhet)
5. Changeling (Darkling)