Post by Veata Chea on Mar 16, 2010 12:38:47 GMT -5
OC Character Application
Character name: Veata Chea [Kingdom of Cambodia]
Age: 17
Gender: Female
Height: 5’1’’
Weight: 108 pds.
Appearance:
Veata is a pretty girl in the opinion of most but her beauty is more of a subtle and innocent thing than something artificial and often flaunted. This opinion may have been caused by the natural look that can be found in her eyes. She is an innocent girl, willing to trust and follow no matter what may come and these traits are oft reflected in her eyes. A certain shine to them speaks volume of her eagerness to love and be loved; it is a look not often found in the eyes of adults but rather in children untouched by the world. This girl’s heart-shaped face only adds on to the child-like quality of her eyes as it makes her eyes the main focus of her face and they appear large and kitten-like. Besides her dark brown eyes, the female is noted to have raven black hair that falls halfway down her back while her bangs are uneven; the bangs to the side will stop a little above her eyes but more towards the center they fall a bit lower. Veata will usually leave her hair down as she finds it’s easier to move with but on the occasion, she will allow for others to place her hair up in such a way that it frames her face. Veata’s skin shows no wrinkles or markings and she is known for smiling often so the framing of her hair around her face is a pleasant thing.
As is custom among the richer families in Cambodia, Veata has pale skin not found among the commoners. Her father was the head of one of the richest families in her country and as such, he raised her with some of those ideals. One such thing that he taught her was to go out with a parasol each day or take other measurements to avoid the darkening of her naturally pale skin and the habit has stayed with her even years after his death.
Veata’s figure is to be considered slender but not exactly slim or thin. She is of average weight and it adds a healthy, natural glow about her. This healthy glow is also helped by the fact that she is a student of Pradal Serey, a form of kickboxing that originated from her country, and practiced every few days or so up until she was drawn into the life of a pirate. Even with the quitting of her practices, Veata is a fit female with the memory of the skills in her body.
Personality:
Veata, despite her age, acts more like a child than she does an adult. Her family raised her up to be a very loved child but as such, she is extremely dependent and needy of others. The others of her past also raised her up with just as much love after the death of her family; there was no chance for her in such an environment to learn to be independent. This doesn’t bother her at all though when others confront her about it. Their opinions don’t usually matter much to her because they are not important to her in her heart.
Her heart is what governs most of her emotions and actions each day. Such a thing has been labeled as impulsive by others but Veata sees it as she wishes. She will not allow for others to deter her opinions easily. In her view, she is merely listening to her heart unlike all the others around her…This has led to some trouble though; comments that have been spoken without thought and actions that are taken without plan have led her into more than a few dangerous situations. Combine that with her natural curiosity and one has a recipe for trouble when leaving the girl alone. It doesn’t help either that during dangerous situations, she is more liable to depend on others to get her out unless she is alone.
The interesting thing about Veata is that she is actually quite capable of fending and taking care of herself. It is her preference however to let others to clean up the messes and troubles that she leaves in her wake. The fear of being left behind by others once again plays a large role in this habit. Her belief is that as long as she doesn’t show how independent she truly is, others will still care for her.
When the female is sad she will mask this sadness and save the tears for a private area if she can help it. Her father and those following after him taught her not to show any weakness, only strength. While this has gotten her through many tough times in the past, it has also blocked others from reaching out to her when she is upset.
When she is angry, which is rather easy because of her quick temper, she will act on this anger which has led to the injuries of many. She is also well known for holding grudges that aren’t easily forgotten because of her good memory. When she is happy, she lets the world know with a bright smile on her lips and eyes shining with excitement. It doesn’t take much to make Veata happy and the buzz from that usually lasts all day. Because she is so easy to please, a person that prefers low maintenance over high maintenance people find her very enjoyable.
Although constantly happy and cheerful, Veata is sensitive to the mood of the room despite her obliviousness. These are the times when she will take on the mood of those she is with or she will try to fix it. Her love of these people is genuine and it drives her insane to see them upset for any reason.
Class:Gambler
Likes:
- Maltese Tigers
- Firecrackers
- Drawing
- Dancing
- The night sky
- Plush toys
- Playing games
- Temples
Dislikes:
- Being ignored
- Being yelled at
- Not getting what she wants
- Perverts
- Being laughed at
- Alligators
- Extremely hot weather
- Bombs
- Boredom
Strengths:
Strong willed: Veata has a determination uncharacteristic of those her age. A strong and independent creature, her belief is to take problems head on, bear through it, and then move on in life. From her father she has learned that it is best to keep one’s troubles to one’s self and as such, the female has a strong mental capacity to endure situations that others would have given up in or broken to long ago on her own.
Loyalty: Above all else in her mind, the young woman holds her loyalty to others first and foremost. She is never quick to betray nor is she ever willing to leave a friend or ally behind even at the risk of her own life. An aristocratic upbringing may have had a hand in this unwavering trait but the kindness and love of her family encouraged this as well.
Quick Thinker: As quick on her feet as she is with her thinking, her actions are often boiled down to pure instinct in the opinions of most. What others don’t seem to realize though is that her thought process often moves quickly through the various scenarios of the situation not because she is exceptionally smart but because she has a rather active imagination. She accepts every possibility with the knowledge of its probability of happening and in turn, finds a fitting solution to them that others may have passed over. This has led her to being a quick thinker in most situations.
Lady Luck: To those that have come to know the girl best, they are quick to think of the child as one of Lady Luck’s favorites. Given her class, this would serve as no surprise but her luck seems to extend outside of merely just her weaponry skills. There have been a few situations in the past where the success can’t come from merely skill, which is lacking of Veata at times, but a large dose of luck.
Manipulator: A trait seen as negative in the eyes of all but herself, Veata has no issue with manipulating various situations and people to her favor. Her personality comes off as light and playful, an innocent and naïve child that nobody would think capable of influencing others in any way but that is exactly what happens. A lack of a moral conscious has aided as well in the continuation of this “habit”.
Weaknesses:
Short Temper: When things don’t go Veata’s way she is known for blowing up over it. It doesn’t matter how large or how small of a thing it is, everything is enough to light the girl’s fuse. As such she has been pulled into a few incidents with those of higher power and strength that found her temper unpleasant. If it were not for her unusual good luck she might very well be ten miles beneath the ground at this point.
Shattered: Past memories have left a heavy scar both physically and mentally on Veata. As such, the more emotional she tends to be, the more susceptible she is to falling back into these memories. In terms of mentality she is close to shattering and there are very few things tying her down that keep her connected to this world and above the water of her own dark memories. During the moments that she falls prey to her own weakness, the best words to describe her state is temporary insanity. This leaves her useless and unable to do a thing at the present moment but the effects have been known to last for weeks at a time.
Dependent: As it goes hand in hand with her mental incapabilites at times due to her memories, Veata is a dependent child. She is needy of other’s presences and their support as well. She has to be watching after and taken care of. It is her greatest fear to ever be left behind and her greatest hatred to understand that she will never be able to survive on her own.
Irrational: A flat out refusal to bend to the will and the whims of reality is often compressed into the single trait known as irrationality. The female however would prefer to look to it as being imaginative and tying loose the threads that tie the mind down. While this does hold true, it has also lead to the girl doing things that are just beyond plain comprehension. She may be able to run through various scenarios in the blink of an eye but Veata doesn’t take into accountant the consequences of what may occur because of the laws or reality.
History:
Veata was born to perhaps one the oldest and strongest aristocratic families of her country. As such she was allowed a well provided and sheltered childhood unlike the commoners of her time. The youngest and only daughter of the household of eight children, she grew up spoiled and loved as well. Never in her life did she have to lift a finger to work for what she wanted and never did she have to worry about the consequences of her actions. Her father’s doting behavior and high status protected her from any outside harm that may have fallen upon her until she reached the age of eight.
Her father’s protection was perhaps both a blessing and a curse to the young Veata. Because of him she was able to grow up innocent and naïve to the world’s horrors but it also left her unprepared for the years to come after her eight birthday. Outside of her safe and comforting home a civil war was raging that she knew nothing about. Every tutor that came into the household had been given explicit instructions to inform the girl of nothing about the terrors and never was she allowed outside of her home’s walls. To do so would have been her death by the hand of the communist group known as the Khmer Rouge that was quickly spreading across the country. She was educated, rich, a noble, the epitome of the very things that the Khmer Rouge had set out to destroy. If ever they had found Veata, she would have been the first to be killed despite her age.
Eventually, after eight years of living in safety, there came the day where the family was forced to flee unexpectedly from the country. Her father, having foreseen this turn of events years ago, had built their home close to the border of Thailand. His money and power made crossing the border over Thailand a simple matter…at least, it should have made it a simple matter.
And this, was the incident in which Veata’s unusual favor of luck began to take shape. The soldiers that had taken up border patrol were cruel and sadistic men; corrupted creatures unlike the men that her father had been used to dealing with years before. Over the years that her family had cut themselves off from the outside world it had become a frightening Hell full of demons unfamiliar to the males. To Veata, however, this was her first venture into this cruel place and the effect upon her seemed to be even stronger. She was merely a child that had never been treated harshly before. To have stranger words yelled at her by angry strangers and have a gun repeatedly shoved into her small frame was worse than even her darkest nightmares. Her fear only sated the demonic hunger of these men and within moments they became even crueler.
To cross the border a game was to be played. Something easy, a card game that even the youngest of children could play. The stakes were anything but childish though. A game based upon chance and the draw of a hand. For every round that was won, one of the ten belonging to the family name Chea would be allowed to cross over. For every round that was lost, a life would be lost…and only one could play this game, only the young and vulnerable Veata would be allowed to gain passage for her family.
Perhaps it was the threat of death and responsibility pressed onto her shoulders, perhaps it was something she had been born with from the very start, perhaps the god of luck was won over by this little girl with her desperate eyes and shaking hands. Whatever the reason was, Veata’s unusual luck gained passage for each and every single one of her family members across the Thai border.
It seemed the trouble didn’t end there though. Instead of fleeing from Thailand, the family was instead forced into a refugee camp with others who were under a similar predicament. Everything they owned or considered remotely valuable was taken away from them by the soldiers or left behind in their need to flee the Khmer Rouge. There was one way however to take back what they had lost and gain even more; the answer was in the card games.
As reluctant as Veata’s father was to the idea of introducing his only daughter into such a dangerous world, he realized that with her talent was a way out of this Hell with every single member of his family. Nights soon became consumed with playing card games that would win the family a bit of food, a bit of gold, a bit of cloth. Everything that the Chea family found was needed in order to survive, their youngest member was soon bringing in to them through her games of pure chance. From the start they began to lose more than they were gaining but as time came to pass, Veata developed an eye for what she was doing. The games won in a night jumped from a few to almost all over the next four years.
By the age of twelve, she had developed both her skills and luck into something that was considered almost to be a legend. People soon became wary of the young female with her deck of cards and innocent smile. It was only through cheating and her own mishaps were they able to win anything but this didn’t matter to Veata for very long. In the course of four years since they had been forced into the refugee camp, she had earned enough money to take not only herself but the other nine members of her family out of the camp and the country.
The Chea family left in the dead of the night, returning briefly to Cambodia to steal back a mere fraction of the family’s fortune hidden away. They left for a safer country across the ocean known as America where they resumed their previous style of life before the horrors of the civil war. For a time they were happy in their own isolated world. Veata no longer was allured into the calling of the cards in order for survival but the female often found herself longing for the nights where she played. She had become addicted to the rush of winning a game, of depending on nothing but her pure luck to get her through the night unharmed.
A friend of her father recognized this in the thirteen-year-old Veata. He was a renowned weapon designer and convinced her father that the girl was better off with an apprenticeship under him. Over the course of five years he taught the girl of not only various weapon designs but also of a way to incorporate her unusual luck into a style of fighting unique only to herself. At the end of her apprenticeship with him he presented her with various weapons that he had forged with her in mind. They were weapons that worked well and quickly with her slight frame and depended on her luck that the two had developed even further during their time together.
Around this time her father finally fell prey to the predator known as death. The impact was hard, harder than even the frightful incident involving the gamble of her family’s life. Her household was nothing but a household of painful memories and just months later, the girl took up her sword and left the home behind to live on her own. Along the way she continued to develop her skills to morph into the young woman that she is today.
Sample Post:
A yawn darted through Veata’s lips as she leaned against the couch casually. The man was once again too close to for comfort but there wasn't much she could do against him. She wanted to kick him away but she could see her Pa out of the corner of her eye, a knowing look in his eye as he gave a small shake of his head.
It was hard for her to see the points of such events like this but it was what her Pa wanted. He had looked so proud earlier that morning when he had announced an artist was coming to take pictures of his little girl. That happy gleam in his eye was something that she hadn’t been willing to snatch away. He hardly looked happy anymore and Veata didn’t want to be the one that blocked him from something that he hadn’t felt for a while. Besides, she had thought it would have been fun at the time to look as pretty as the other village girls.
Hours later, Veata was beginning to think otherwise. The positions that the foreign artist had her in were unnatural and uncomfortable. Her body wasn’t as flexible to movement as a cat’s but the artist clearly thought otherwise. It was driving her insane to bend to his whims but she highly doubted that the artist would appreciate being kicked in the stomach. They would never get the drawings then that her Pa had promised would always carry this memory.
“A little longer,” the male called, motioning with his hands how he wanted the small child to turn.
Veata gave an exaggerated roll of her eyes but she obliged. It surprised her though when the artist motioned for her Pa to come over and place her in his lap. Every other painting had been a single drawing of just her, it pleased her to know that the memory of Pa would also be in this drawing.
Her short legs gave an excited kick as Pa stared down at her with proud brown eyes. His arms wrapped around her comfortably and pulled her close. They both gave a bright smile, smiles that barely fit their face and reflected just how close they were.
Veata gave a small smile as she ran her fingers over the drawing many years later. Looking back at it now, she was very glad that she had taken those drawings with her Pa. The day that they had come, her family had opened the envelopes eagerly while she played in the garden. She hadn’t cared much for the drawings at the time but years later, she was very appreciative of them.
Pa was long dead now but he must have known back then, he must have known that she would outlive him far longer than a normal person. It had killed her to go to his funeral when she was still so young, killed her to realize that she couldn’t go up and talk as if he was her adoptive daughter because the people there had known her as a child. They might have hurt her if they had known of her unusual...talents so she had had to go the funeral under the guise of a niece. Not being able to walk up to the people and tell them how much she had loved her Pa was one of the hardest things of her life.
He must have known that too because when she came back to sort through the belongings, one of her older brothers had handed her a small box. There had been an envelope on top of all the objects and when she had opened it, she had found numerous drawings of their little family. The memories attached to each drawing had made her smile and laugh. That had probably been his very goal from the start.
Veata gave a respectful bow to her father’s grave as she pocketed the small drawing. She could have said thank you to him, she could have thanked him for everything he had ever done for her but Veata remained silent. The emotions spilling from her heart was something that her father could feel no matter where he was. Let him feel those emotions instead of trying to put words on them.
Her love for him would always be stronger than her words anyways.
Britannia beam! (If there is anything that needs fixing, let me know.)