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

[attr="class","rostersub"]a twenty-eight year old behaviorist from cerulean city

[attr="class","rostercat"]NEILL CARTER

[attr="class","rostercat"]TWENTY-EIGHT

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

[attr="class","rostercat"]GREY ACE

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

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

[attr="class","rostercat2"]
✓ empathetic, curious, quick learner, alert, super good with plants

- paranoid, anxious, noncommittal, aimless

? wears a bandana that says 'bark ranger' that was obviously meant for a dog, can't understand pokespeech but really wants to learn

Neill spends a lot of his time caught up in his own head.  He has a strong tendency to over-analyze just about everything, and when he's not wading through his own paranoia, he's usually drifted off into one fantasy or another.  As such, he can be a touch awkward in day-to-day interactions.  He prefers to step back and watch before speaking, and even then, he's rarely convinced that he's "doing it right".

The amount of thought he puts into things, at the very least, grants him a powerful empathy.  He's not always incredibly happy about it -- it brings a powerful second-hand embarrassment and acute awareness of what others are doing at just about all times -- but you can trust Neill to grasp your point of view.  (This extends to most points of view which, unfortunately for Neill, has led to some interesting bouts of self-doubt when it comes to his sexuality.)  Butter him up with a healthy dose of alcohol and chocolate ice cream, and he'll sit you down and tell you all about his feelings on radical empathy -- and will likely be mortified the next morning.  You heartless, heartless monster.

Intelligent, but easily distracted and overwhelmed, Neill has an approximate knowledge of many, many things.  He's fiercely curious but lacks the discipline to take it anywhere, and has fallen into a routine of casual picking at whatever topic suits his fancy in that moment.

Neill has a lot of big plans for himself that rarely come to fruition.  Held back by his anxiety, he runs a second life for himself in his head, in some parallel universe to the one he's in now.  A life where he's unnaturally fit and attractive, and has heaps and heaps of friends.  A life where he's effortlessly out to his friends and family and wears shirts proclaiming his queerness to the world without fear.  A life where he got off his goddamn ass and got into pokemon training years ago.

Rarely, he taps into this "alternate self" and wears it like a costume -- mostly when he's doing one-time things that stress him out.  Making a scary phone call?  Get other Neill to do it!  This plan has, predictably, fallen flat on its face more times than it's worked, with Neill breaking character back to his nervous, stammering self.  Perhaps the worst backfiring is the time he tried to play cool at the local grocery store, only to realize after the fact that he had lied about his entire life to a cashier.... and now feels the need to keep up the charade every single time he goes shopping there.

He can also be more than a bit clumsy.  Hyper-aware as he is of others, it saps his attention on himself, and he's often tripping over door frames or up flights of stairs.

Neill is often embarrassed to ask for help, which leads to a lot of the stagnation he's currently dealing with. He's too embarrassed to ask people how to get into the pokemon breeding scene, he's too embarrassed to ask people how to find a good doctor, he's just embarrassed 100% of the time. To make it worse, he's too embarrassed to ask people why he can't understand pokespeech, or how to get better about it -- he's jealous, bitterly so, but. C'est la vie.

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

[attr="class","rostercat2"]A kanto man, born and raised, Neill carries a lot of pride for his home region.  This is, unfortunately, where most of the zest to his backstory ends -- Neill led a rather dull life up until his bold choice to move to Inset.

A single child, he often entertained himself at home with books and video games, which stoked the fires of his growing imagination.  He did well in school, his parents were well enough off, and things were painfully, gloriously average.

He never really managed to make friends outside of the classroom, but it didn't occur to him until much later that there was anything strange about this.  Didn't everyone else go home to their books and fantasy worlds?

Perhaps the worst thing to happen to him as a child was coming to the slow, heels-dug-in-and-dragged-all-the-way-to-the-bank realization that he wasn't straight.  That he might not even be gay, and that something about him was very, very broken.  (In truth, he's still sorting that out.)  His father, while not outright abusive, certainly had plenty off-color remarks to make about queer folk... and Neill kept it in.  Not worth that conversation, not at all.  Neill learned quickly the comforts of the closet.

The second worst was his parents splitting up, but, honestly?  He was glad to see it happen.  His friends at the time reacted much more strongly than he did, offering comfort and shoulders to cry on.  Why should he cry, he wondered, if he didn't even like his father?

Neill went off to college, just another chapter in his bland story.  He loved it, of course, like any cerebral, curious kid does.  His aimlessness served him poorly, and he left with a degree in pokemon behavior and ecology and highly treasured knowledge, but no plan forward.

He went back home.

A few months after graduation, he had a plan: he'd become a pokemon trainer!  He'd always enjoyed spending time with pokemon, especially the family growlithe (who had passed a few years back, rest in peace).  He could start his own ranch maybe, become a breeder -- maybe he'd try his hand at coordinating contests, too!  

It was scary, and he didn't know exactly what he was doing.  The research alone took him a year.  Nervous days of "I'll check it tomorrow, at least I opened up the webpage" turned into weeks, turned into months, turned into a whole year wasted in the tedium of his own routines.

He waffled, and time rushed past him. 

It took a night of deep, deep drunken depression to finally wake him up.  He had to go, and he had to make sure he had no way out:  He bought a ticket to Inset, and donated every last penny of his savings to charity before he could chicken out.

New place, new start, new Neill.  What could go wrong?

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