Phoenix/profile

> "*...*"
> ― Phoenix
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## Phoenix

* Act.1
* Act.2

## Personality

[++ adaptable/intuitive/gregarious,

= curious/imaginative/expressive,

-- lily-livered/dishonest/self-serving]

    Phoenix is a bright and energetic girl with a vivid imagination, for better or for worse. Her upbringing made her very independent and ready to adjust to new things, new places, and new people. Her greetings are friendly and she tries her best to stay in good standing with everyone and avoid stepping on toes (even if she has to lie to achieve that), but at the same time, she does not get so invested in someone that she cannot live without them. She enjoys solving problems and exploring mysteries, but shies away from making too many commitments to others. It's not that she doesn't want to help, she just, ah-- doesn't have the time for all that right now! Phoenix tries her best to appear composed, but they are only efforts, and she is almost invariably a nervous mess on the inside. And despite how sweet she may be, she can be surprisingly callous without meaning to.

## Background

As the only child of a single father who had many secrets and could never stay in one place for very long, Phoenix learned early on not to expect permanence. Don't get too attached to where you are and who you know, because it can and will change in the blink of an eye. She was a bright child both in mind and spirit, and learned to keep herself fed and clothed at a young age. Those long hours she spent at home my herself as her father was out tending to business were spent wholly immersing herself in cartoons and video games, sparking a lifelong love for wild fiction. But why was she alone? ... Well, truth be told she never really figured that out, but it didn't bother her much. Father never truly denied her questions, but he never quite answered them either. At least once a year they moved and it usually entailed travelling to a completely different state (at one point they even lived in England for several months). The law would likely have ruled his care neglectful, and it may have been, but he loved his daughter and she loved him. Even that love, however, would meet its finite end one day. This she knew. So when the day came that a policeman arrived at her door bearing mournful news, Phoenix accepted it. And at the age of 14, in a small South Dakota town, Phoenix was placed in foster care.

        Her foster family was okay. She didn't hate them, but she was in no hurry to get close either. First names for everyone, no 'brother', 'sister', or 'dad'; never called anyone 'mom' in her life so why start now? They occasionally even remarked that she treated her stay with them more like a business arrangement than appropriate for someone her age. To keep herself mentally stimulated, she devleoped a hobby-- no, it was only a hobby because of her limited access, it was more akin to fiery passion-- for building robots. It started with tiny pre-selected kits, but it wasn't long before she was devising plans herself and putting together this and that. Her fosters' only objection was the late nights she would be awake, tinkering and tweaking and breaking and fixing, being just slightly too noisy to ignore. But Phoenix did her fair share of work around the house and then some, and she was kind and respectful in her own way, and she thought public school was fascinating after years of homeschooling and intermittent tutoring and eagerly completed her schoolwork, and soon enough she settled into normalcy and spent the next four years peacefully... albeit restlessly. At 18, finally free to live her own life, she collected everything she'd saved from allowance and working a few part-time weekend jobs and moved across the country to the east coast. It was high time for something new. Within a year she'd begun her own self-employment, working out of her small apartment fixing old computers and video game equipment, putting her old passions to practice.

        A loyal patron of hers approached her with a peculiar task, and a proposition: "Continue to work with me, and I will personally secure you a full ride in robotic engineering to the university of your choosing." Common sense would have steered clear, but Phoenix's excitement at the mere prospect fueled her acceptance of some brief, but incredibly vague terms. 'You can't win big if you don't risk big,' she thought. For nearly two years Phoenix did quiet occasional work for this individual and their connections, mostly consisting of very hush-hush repairs of what seemed to be long-abandoned computers, and sometimes dropping off boxes of which she didn't know the contents. She was dubious but the pay was good, but she should have known better-- good things won't last forever. And soon enough her employer made it terrifyingly clear that her most valuable asset was not her technical skill, but the fact that she was nobody, all alone, easy to manipulate in a crisis, easy to dispose of if necessary. In an abrupt turn of events, she had been cornered and forced to choose between her own life and the life of someone she had never met, but these people needed to be rid of. In her panic, she detonated a bomb and became a murderer, and the trap had sprung, coils of fate wound tightly around her neck.

        Phoenix felt fear in every neuron in her body. For all she knew, her life could end at any moment. She buried herself in her little robot friends to distract herself from what loomed above her, tinkering and tweaking away, but in a crash log, she spotted a strange message that she could not account for. It seemed absurd, but nothing is permanent, and there's no big payoff without big risk, so she held to that hope with all she had, and fled.

## Trivia

* The glasses are purely cosmetic, her vision is fine!
* Her love of robots is partially rooted in aspiration; she admires their ability to work efficiently without the burden of emotion and anxiety. She hates when she gets irrational and panics under stress, and wishes she could think clearly and make the best possible decision at any given moment.
* Carries heavy guilt for what she did, but more than anything fears the repercussions and wants to move on as if it never happened.

## Quotes

* > "*No, Juniper--I am not fine. I took someone else's life so that I could wake up the next morning and pretend like it never happened. I ended an innocent person's life because I was too-- too much of a god damn coward to do the right thing. I... I didn't even fight it! For god's sake!*"
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― Phoenix to Juniper; Act 2.1