[attr="class","rostername"]@emily

[attr="class","rostersub"]a [twenty two] year old [researcher] from [Mauville City, Hoenn]

[attr="class","rostercat"]emily catherine bennett

[attr="class","rostercat"]22

[attr="class","rostercat"]female

[attr="class","rostercat"]straight

[attr="class","rostercat"]researcher

[attr="class","rostercat"]grass

[attr="class","rostercat2"]Emily does not make a memorable first impression. She's quiet, shy, and soft spoken. Pair that with a perfectly average height and an unremarkable face, and it makes for a person who's quite easy to forget about. She likes it that way. Flying under the radar is her thing. Being the center of attention makes her nauseated and she avoids it whenever she can. An introvert through and through, she's happiest when she's by herself and needs time to recharge if she's around too many people for too long.

She enjoys learning how things work and why. All her life, Emily was a successful student and a good daughter. That was how she defined herself. That was all that mattered. She never really had friends or hobbies; she just had her academics and her proud parents. She's graduated with a bachelor's degree in pokemon physiology but she was recently turned down by all three medical schools she applied to, and Emily took it hard. The rejections derailed all her plans. They made her aimless, and the aimlessness has made her anxious and unfocused. She doesn't know what she's doing. She entered Inset on a whim and it shows. She knows nothing about the region, and has never really interacted with pokemon outside of the non-invasive studies she assisted in as an undergrad.

She was always more interested in learning about the world than experiencing it and before traveling to Inset, she'd never gone farther than one route away from home. She's never pictured herself as an adventurer, not even while she was actively on her way to Inset. She is directionless for now, searching for a goal to work towards. Her own likes and dislikes have never really been explored--it's always been about making her parents proud. She knows she likes being alone, or at least she likes it better than the risk of getting close to people and letting them down. Failure is her greatest fear and she's living through it right now--or, more accurately, running away from it.

She's never really warmed up to anyone other than her family and a few of her professors, but she's got a hideously dry sense of humor that rears its head every now and then. She's compassionate as all get out and would do just about anything for anyone--hell, eighty percent of the reason she went to college in the first place was because she knew her parents wanted her to have a degree. She's not good at taking care of herself, but she'll happily take care of other people.

Unfortunately, all of that compassion is buried under several miles' worth of shame and embarrassment at the moment. Or perhaps it's a good thing--perhaps it will keep her from being taken advantage of? Not that that's a side Emily would ever see. The glass is either full to the brim in her eyes, or it's half empty. There is no middle ground.

[attr="class","rostercatsub2"]PERSONALITY

[attr="class","rostercat2"]Emily was the first and only child in the Bennett family. Her parents hadn't planned on having kids so soon--or at all, if they were being honest. Neither had a college education, but they did all right for themselves; her father was a line cook and her mother was a receptionist for a groomer. They weren't rolling in cash but for Mauville City in the ninety's, it was plenty. The pregnancy threw them for a loop but they scrimped, they saved, they planned, and a few months after that pregnancy test turned positive, they held their brown haired baby for the first time.

Emily was a shy one from the beginning. She was always happier playing by herself than she was with other kids. Her mother's work had big, floor-to-ceiling glass walls to let in natural light, and she regularly brought Emily to work with her. Emily sat in the grass outside the groomer's building and watched the Wurmple scuttle to and fro, or laid on her back and watched birds soar overhead. She never tried to interact with the pokemon but she entertained herself for hours that way, just quietly existing around them and observing. Her parents did what they could to encourage her curiosity about pokemon and nature. They watched Pokemon Planet on their tiny TV and took her to the library, where they picked out books about species found around Mauville. Emily never asked for those things--she was too shy to ever really ask for anything, even from her parents--but she read and she watched and she learned, more to make her parents happy than herself.

For her fourth birthday, she got a miniature science kit, complete with binoculars and a telescope, among other cheap plastic gadgets, and a notepad to write down her observations. The telescope went mostly ignored--she wasn't terribly interested in things that were so far away--but she made excellent use of the binoculars while her mother worked. When school started, she breezed through the low standards of the public school's science curriculum. The other classes were similarly easy for anyone paying attention, but science was her best area. At parent teacher conferences, the teachers always praised Emily's academic performance and her parents always beamed. If she became a scientist, she'd have a salaried career with benefits, she'd be able to travel, she'd constantly be learning--oh, that was what they wanted for their baby girl. They wanted better for her than they'd been able to do for themselves.

Unfortunately for Emily, she hadn't ever socialized much with other kids. She didn't fit in. She wasn't bullied, per se, but she went through the stereotypical signs of it. She was always picked last in gym class. She ate lunch alone. If her teacher assigned a group project but didn't assign groups, Emily completed the project alone. There were other kids with similarly poor social skills who were louder than she was, with bigger personalities and more expectations. They were bullied. They were mocked. They were called geek and loser. If they complained to an adult, they were called tattle tale. But not Emily.

She was quiet. She kept her head down. She flew so far under the radar that by the time elementary school came to an end, kids who'd been in class with for years didn't know anything about her. Was she good at sports? Did she like pokemon? What was her middle name? None of them knew, because even when she was included in conversations, she didn't tell anyone anything. She made herself forgettable and so they forgot. She wasn't bullied, she wasn't taunted, she wasn't teased. She was just invisible.

Her teachers noticed that she didn't have many friends but as long as her grades stayed high, they didn't mention it to her parents. She carried on through middle school that way: quietly doing her work, wordlessly getting A's and B's, friendlessly staying close enough to the top of the class to be impressive without causing hard feelings among the overachievers.

Mauville City went under heavy construction when she was ten but as a person without a driver's license or a commute, it didn't affect Emily's life until the construction ended, just as she entered high school. The cost of living had climbed more and more each year and her parents were always careful to not discuss it when she was around, but when the renovations were complete, they couldn't hide it anymore. Rent went through the roof as the area politicians tried to attract wealthier people to Mauville. They couldn't afford it. Her parents got side jobs and worked themselves to the bone, trying to keep Emily in the same school--as far as they were aware, she had friends there and moving would be devastating. They never mentioned that logic to her because they didn't want her to feel guilty; she never said she'd be okay with moving because she didn't want them to work so hard for nothing.

As soon as she was old enough, Emily mentioned wanting to apply for jobs. Her parents said no--school was her only job. They worked longer hours at their second jobs, and tried to move up at their main jobs to put money aside for college. When senior year rolled around, it was application time. By the spring, acceptance letters rolled in. Veranturf University's big packet came first. Congratulations!, it read. University of Hoenn - Mauville City was next and it started with a matching congratulations! The big packets kept coming in from all the nearby universities.

In the end, Emily chose U of H. They were right near home and they offered the best aid, though that wasn't saying much. Her grades were damn near excellent but her extracurriculars were all but non existent. No sports, few clubs, not even a part time jobs. Just academics. She got one merit based scholarship and one needs based grant. It wasn't nearly enough, and the paltry amount her parents had set aside barely covered books for the first semester. So she took out student loans and, like her parents had with her, she made it work.

She majored in pokemon physiology with the intention of becoming a pokemon doctor, maybe even a surgeon. Her parents were over-the-moon proud of their daughter being the first college student in the family. Once she moved out, they moved to Veranturf Town, where the cost of living was lower. They lived on rice and beans and carried on with two jobs, doing everything in their power to support their daughter's education. And Emily did everything in her power to make it worth their while. She studied obsessively. Her assigned roommate, Jenna, went off and partied while Emily studied. Jenna joined a sorority while Emily studied. Jenna made friends and had fun while Emily studied.

By junior year, they were past the weed out classes and into the application based classes. Girls like Jenna had support systems in place. They had friends to teach them which professors to take and which to avoid like the plague, they had sorority sisters to vent to, they had their vices to get them through midterms and finals. Emily had no one. Emily had nothing. And, for the first time in her life, Emily failed.

She got a big fat D on her Chemistry of Fire Type Pokemon final. Passing the class required a C. She stared at the scrawled D like it was a death sentence, and it might as well have been. She would have to retake it. She would have to pay tuition for that class again. She nearly crumbled under the stress of it all.

But she retook it, she visited the tutors, and carried on the same way she had been--studying and studying and studying some more. It worked well enough for her to get by. And then it was time to apply to medical school. It was an expensive, time consuming process, but her parents insisted that she let them pay for the standardized tests and the applications fees. They couldn't pay for Emily's tuition, they said, but they could pay for this.

In high school, her letters from the universities had been big, fat packets. Now, they were little envelopes. She had applied to three schools--one dream, one realistic, one safety--and all of her letters were the same. We regret to inform you...

If that D on her midterm hadn't been a death sentence, this certainly was. She went to her parents house in Veranturf Town and laid the letters wordlessly on the counter. If heartbroken looks could kill, Emily would have been dead. I have a plan, she told them. She didn't. Not really. She was speaking off the cuff. But she had to make something of herself, had to do something. She couldn't let her parents down, not after all they'd sacrificed for her. I'm going to take a year off. There's a region I read about. Inset. They have pokemon researchers. I'll study for a year. I'll beef up my resume. And next year, I'll apply again.

All she knew about the Inset Region came from a little brochure she'd seen in the tutoring center. Her parents breathed a collective sigh of relief. Their timid, quiet daughter, it seemed, was growing a spine--she had a plan, she wasn't succumbing to failure, she wasn't letting hard times beat her. That was their perception, anyway. In reality, she was just running--as fast and as far away she could get.

[attr="class","rostercatsub2"]HISTORY