Charlotte Grey

Charlotte Grey, better known locally by her nickname Shirley, is the eldest daughter of Richard Grey. A somewhat humourless woman, Shirley is level-headed, good with business, and has a rather blunt disposition. She is also rather spiritual, and has a reverence for both nature and the divine.
An accomplished ranger, Shirley spent most of her teenage and young adult years living off the land through her wits and her father's teachings; she tells people that the only reason she still isn't in the wilderness is responsibility to her family, as she is the only one of her sisters who has enough business acumen to take over for her father. In lieu of living in one of the larger cities, she makes her home in Renick, close to the foothills of the Seldarin Mountains. Not only does the more quiet lifestyle suit her, but it also allows her to keep a low profile from the enterprising men who would like to have a piece of her father's metaphorical pie. This is also the reason she tends to go by her father's childish nickname for her, rather than her full name.
Shirley is one of the few people known to not only have crossed over the mountain range, but to have done it several times and to know the path well. When she was 31, she took Raito and his party across the mountains, which was by far the largest group she had ever guided across the range.
Charlotte eventually married Aiden Webber at her dying father's request. Shirley moved to Rochester, where she managed the AAA alongside her husband. Their relationship was, while never exactly loving and always confrontational, highly functional: she would take long weekends into the Rhone Forest, he would work 13 hour days, and they became very adept at quickly reaching logical compromises, though they never quite mastered doing it quietly. The two, with their rigid demeanors and business acumen, pushed the company to even further successes while also having 5 children, all of which were conceived after a few too many drinks at the mutually-loathed yet unavoidable gatherings hosted by Aiden’s mother.
Charlotte is a direct ancestor of Percival Webber.
== Childhood ==
Father: Richard Grey, famed explorer, adventurer and businessman.
Mother: Patricia Grey. She passed away at the age of 58 from a protracted illness of the lungs. In no way an adventurer herself, Patricia was a good wife, mother and housekeeper, and did more than her fair share of community service in her day.
Younger Sisters: Odette and Pauline. Both are married and have several children each; Odette lives in Arlington, and Pauline lives in Purcell. Pauline always had a fragile and sickly condition, and moved to Purcell in the hopes that the sea air would be good for her. Odette has always had a more flighty, dreamy nature; in her late teens, she fell in love with a young merchant she met through her father's business contacts, and moved to the city to live with him.
Charlotte has always shared her father's love of the outdoors, if not his passion for business. Ever since she was old enough to crawl, she's prefered to be outside, and all throughout her childhood, the highlights of her life were her camping trips with her father, where she learned how to hunt, fish and survive. In her teenage years, she started going out on her own more frequently; when she was 14, she scaled the Seldarin Mountains, and by the age of 16, she successfully crossed over the range into Yeto. Using the skills she had learned from her father, she managed to become a rather well-off trader in the country; leveraging her father's name and her own skills, she approached the Shimoru family and forged a trading agreement between the two names using the Mirovian Bay shipping route. Despite her success in Yeto, she never considered staying there permanently, and came back to Asanon.
As she grew into adulthood, her parents, Patricia especially, began to stress her eventual marriage. However, the men that she met were none to her liking: interested in her father's business money and not interesting themselves. Further, it seemed that every man she met who shared her interest in the outdoors was not at all suited for running the business, a task that she knew would fall to her. Odette was an easily-distracted and simple woman, not at all interested or capable of managing a national franchise, and Pauline's health issues made her parents hesitant to place on her that amount of responsibility. Due to the somewhat sexist nature of Asanon's business laws, she also knew that she would be behooved to have a husband when the time came to take over. Seeing this as an unfortunate reality, Charlotte moved to Renick in her late twenties, where she tried to live quietly and fully until her inescapable future responsibilities caught up to her.
== Category:Character ==