User Profile

MUN INFO:
Name: Lauren; Rikku-mun; Gil (whatever floats your boat)
Age: 20
Personal LJ: commaqueen
Messenger Handles: gimmeyourgil (AIM)

CHARACTER INFO:
Character Name: Rikku (Esperor) (made-up last name for the game :3 Derived from Esperer which in French means “to hope”)
Source: Final Fantasy X/Final Fantasy X-2
Character Age: 20 (Birthday: June 16)
Animal Species: A partially white/cream and light-yellowy-orange ferret
Job: Alchemist Apprentice ; Steam Technician/Tinker


Character Appearance: Rikku is five feet and two inches tall and self-conscious about her height, though she’d never say (but she’s quick to offense when people insult her vertical ineptitude). She’s slim despite her love of sugary sweets. Rikku has been teased in the past for lacking breasts, hips, and thighs, but such taunts are normally shut up by a punch to the face.

Rikku’s eyes are a vivid green, the color of leaves in spring, and patterned with a bizarre spiral around her pupils. Rikku nearly never wears makeup aside from lipbalm in the winter and the occasional lipgloss on a fancy occasion; having never learned how to do it “right” Rikku tends to feel very self-conscious and uncomfortable whenever she does have to apply makeup to her face. Rikku’s heart-shaped face is the pallet upon which she most vividly expresses her emotions.

Rikku’s hair is naturally blonde and ranges from gold to lighter canary yellows. While it was very long for quite some time, a recent alchemic acsident burnt off the ends of her hair. She desided thereafter to cut her hair to a reasonable length to prevent future acsidents and she wears the remainder of it with her grown-out bangs pinned back to frame her face and the rest of her hair held up in a high, frequently messy ponytail.

Rikku isn’t a very “feminine” girl. While she does enjoy wearing jewelry, Rikku frequently can’t due to the possibility of ruining the pieces with her Alchemic work or the possibility of physical injury with steam (metal conducting heat, and all). Nor does she wear particularly feminine clothing; she doesn’t care much for dresses, and only deigns to wear the occasional skirt (and only if it hits at the knee or above, because she’s something of a wild-child). Rikku frequently wears clothing considered inappropriate for her, much to her father’s chagrin. While she has to wear pants in order to work, Rikku actually prefers to wear pants that crop off at her calves or tuck into knee-high, flat soled boots. She prefers bright, bold colors (especially yellows, greens, blues, and pinks), but she doesn’t actually own much along those lines because cloth due to a strict budget, so she uses small accessories—like ever-present, colorful scarves to offset this lack of color.


Rikku picks up only a few physical traits from her animal counterpart. Specifically, Rikku possesses the ears and the tail of a ferret. The fur that covers these appendages is soft and thick. The hair covering her tail is particularly long. The fur of her ferret ears blends fairly well with the color of her hair, taking on the softer yellow shades of hair in the undercoat and taking on an orange cast in the guard hairs. Her tail, which ends at about her ankles, has a creamy, almost white, undercoat that ranges to yellow; the guard hairs take on an orange cast in places.

It’s commonly known that actual ferrets have a natural “musky” smell to them. Rikku doesn’t possess the scent glands used as a fear response or for marking, and luckily as she’s aged the musk scent has been reduced to almost nothing. She always wears a light perfume, however, that tends to mask the remainder of the smell, normally a sweet, fruity or light flowery scent. (Rikku is secretly quite sensitive about this issue, though, especially since she was teased about it a great deal as a child.)


Character Personality: Rikku’s greatest strengths—eagerness, liveliness, playfulness, cheerfulness, unflinching optimism—can be her greatest weaknesses and a point of irritation for other people. Redeeming her is a general well-meaning and friendliness. Rikku takes great pains to put her best face forward no matter the situation, not quite “suppressing” her negative feelings but trying to transform them into positives. While Rikku isn’t the smartest girl she can be quite clever in a pinch and is imaginative and excitable.

Rikku is a genuinely friendly person who values the people she loves and the time she can spend with them above all other things. She would do anything in her ability to help a friend, and frequently does so whether or not she’s been asked. Consequently, she has a habit of stepping on others’ toes and invading personal space despite the best intentions. Quick to emotion, Rikku can go from happy to sad to angry to back again in record time. Thankfully, these transmutable moods do pass easily, and she is quick to feel contrite and forgive. It would be a mistake to assume that simply because she tends to be easy-going that Rikku is a push-over; she can be exceptionally stubborn and unwilling to back-down, nor will she allow others to treat her like a doormat.

Rikku is deceptively simple and sometimes comes off as being an “open book” because her body language, facial expressions, and voice are extremely expressive. However, there is a certain deceptive quality to her in that she does present herself as cheerful constantly, disguising genuine fear and pain and sorrow, and Sometimes it can be hard to tell exactly where genuine naivety and purposeful obtuseness merge. Her generally open, candid, somewhat blunt, and earnest nature punctuates a strange intuitive quality she possesses concerning the people around her while simultaneously making the moments of deceit questionable. It really isn’t so much that she outright lies so much as that she simply bends the truth or fails to recall certain details. While she’s not intentionally manipulative, Rikku is not necessarily above producing crocodile tears to get her way when it’s really important to her.

Her quirks include an irrational fear of thunder and lightning (something she’s working very hard to get over), extremely expressive body language, and a preoccupation with all things “shiny.” However, if a person had to pinpoint down the things Rikku is most afraid of rejection and being alone. Ironically, because she rarely lets people close enough to see more than just the shadowy reflections of inner pain, Rikku tends to lack the genuine closeness that she so badly wants—allowing herself to depend on and confide in others concerning her pain and fears is a kind of intimacy Rikku can only express with the people closest to her heart, and is a sign of extreme trust and love for her.

Rikku’s curious tendencies match well with the natural curiosity, playfulness, excitability and energy exhibited by ferrets. Thankfully, she doesn’t seem too terribly effected by ferrets’ sleeping habits, since ferrets spend anywhere from fourteen to eighteen hours a day sleeping. She does generally find though that without a full night’s sleep (at the very least, eight hours) she can’t function.



Character Bio:Rikku was born into a small family in Cloverburst. Her father, a man by the name of Sid, was a tinker who specialized in gear-related mechanics, such as watches and bicycles. Rikku’s mother, a young woman by the name of Oriel, was a housewife but assisted Sid in his business. Rikku has only one brother by the name of Anki who is older than her by a good four years. They lived in a full-sized house adjoined to a large workshop, and while they were not rich by any means, they lived comfortably.

Rikku’s home life was moderately normal for the first years of her life. Even as a child she was somehow always underfoot and getting into trouble, though; at the ripe-old age of two her brother was playing “swords” in the house and managed to knock a jar of bespelled soap (meant for the cleaning of old, rusty metal) off the counter and directly onto Rikku’s head. While her mother managed to clean her off before the magic could do her any harm, small amounts of the fluids got into her eyes and lent to them a bizarre spiral pattern around her pupils. Some doctors have conjectured that at some point the exposure to magic may affect her eyes later in life, but as of yet the change seems to have done nothing to affect her ability to see for better or for worse.

At the tender age of four, Rikku’s mother died in a work-related acsident. The details have always been rather shady, but apparently Sid had needed some magicked materials for a project, but they lacked the necessary funds to afford a Madcap. So Rikku’s mother attempted to do the job herself without informing Sid with disastrous results; there was no body left to be buried. Stricken with grief and guilt over his wife’s death, Sid stopped working for nearly a year and slipped into a state of depression involving heavy drinking that just about killed him.

This period in Rikku’s life was spent in relative autonomy; she went and drifted about as she would, from house to house and along the streets till dark and past it, playing in dusty fields at the skirt of town until she had to go crawling back from hunger. During this time, Anki acted as Rikku’s sole authority and provider, earning just enough money from a paper route to keep the two of them from going hungry. During this time, Rikku grew incredibly close to her older brother and aged considerably (mentally) for her age, resolving that she would never respond to life’s disappointments (no matter what happened) like her father had.

Eventually Sid came to his senses again and weaned himself off of the alcohol. Horrified by his neglect and shameful behavior, Sid resolved to do the best he could for his children and to start their lives over. So Sid sold their home and the workshop and the most of his wife’s possessions and the valuables he deemed unnecessary. With the money and the remainder of their valuables, he took Rikku and Anki and moved them to a small apartment in Silverwhip.

This abrupt change turned out to be harder on Rikku than the year-long loss of her father and her mother’s death. The new city was larger than she had ever known anything to be, her new home was unfamiliar and cramped. And Anki, an older boy who was tall for his age and fairly athletic, adapted with relative ease and spent increasing amounts of time with his new friends and tried to separate himself from his little sister like most older siblings do. Rikku resolved herself to make the best of her situation with a tenacity that has become a cornerstone of her character, but it was years before she could truly think of that tiny apartment as home.

Rikku’s trouble in adjusting stemmed less from an unwillingness to make the best of her situation or a want of friends but from rejection. The neighborhood children took one look at her strange blazing green eyes with the dark spirals and resolved that there was something wrong with her. It didn’t help, either, that Cloverburst tends to be associated with old, extremely rural traditions and such a lifestyle is generally viewed as backwards and resistant to change.

Despite the apparent rejection of her peers, Rikku refused to give up, continually putting her best foot forward. This persistence paid off in the end: she was able to make a few friends, including a boy she keeps in touch with to this day, Demyx. Meanwhile, she was left with her own devices after the school hours: her father was busy working, tinkering with watches again as a part-time staple, but this time concentrating on delving into the new steam trade. Rikku found herself fascinated by mechanics, and often made a fixture of herself at her father’s workplace, watching and listening intently as men old enough to be her father or grandfather worked.

Sid disapproved of this, believing that a child her age ought to be out playing; he tried to shoo her off whenever he caught her, threatening her with spankings (but seemingly never following through). It came as something to a surprise to her father one day when she proved herself clever enough to dismantle and then repair a watch with certainty and speed. It wasn’t long after that she began to improve on his own designs. Seeing his daughter’s thirst for knowledge, Sid begrudgingly allowed for her to spend two evenings out of the week watching as she saw fit, so long as she was not in the way.

By this time, life had largely improved for Rikku, and she had made a few friends. So Rikku would spend the rest of her week playing and exploring the vast expanses of the town and all the crooks, crannies, and dark alleys it had to offer. Even for a child, Rikku was exceptionally curious and reckless, spending plentiful time in places a mother would be horrified to hear her child had dared to step foot in. She learned how to steal, how to gamble (right way and skewed both) and how to fight.

Rikku earned a reputation as something of a rambling urchin always getting into places she didn’t belong and frequently biting off more than she could chew. On one occasion Rikku went out to explore the city and went much, much further than she had ever gone before and got so lost in the maze of alleys and streets that she wandered into a park, thinking it was the one near her own home, and got caught out under great trees in the middle of a particularly awful thunderstorm. As it happened, lightning struck one of the trees she took shelter under, cracking it so it nearly fell on top of her and lighting it on fire (albeit briefly; the rain put that out). As a result, while Rikku didn’t necessarily learn not to go wandering she is particularly terrified of thunderstorms and lightning.

It was by those means that Rikku met up with an Alchemist, one of those figures told in stories by well-meaning mothers and fathers to be evil and crooked and monstrous. Despite having lost her own mother to the horrors of magic gone wrong, Rikku found herself fascinated by the man and his chosen profession. Despite his attempts to drive her off, Rikku’s persistence paid off eventually—over time he grew accustomed to her presence, and although he swore he wouldn’t take on an apprentice, by the age of thirteen, Rikku wore him down into agreeing to take her on. It was agreed, however, that Rikku would not be allowed to actually experiment with magic until she was eighteen; in the meanwhile, she was to learn what she could through observation and reading.

Anki finished school and for a short time worked odd jobs about the city, and even tried his hand at his father’s business. Anki had always loved the wilderness, though: the freedom of the country, the possibility of the unknown, and it became clear in less than a year’s time that Anki wasn’t ever going to be happy within the larger cities. So Anki left in search of something else, something more.

Rikku completed her mandatory basic schooling and was invited to work with her father at his work, which she happily accepted, having never outgrown her love for mechanics. Through this job she was able to meet another person she’s grown to call a close friend, Axel Pyregale. (In truth, she’s grown to feel more than that for him, but it’s not a truth she’s currently willing to admit even to herself.) As her Alchemist instructor pointed out, too, it was a good cover occupation for her; in her spare time, she continued her apprenticeship in Alchemy, and eventually was allowed to begin helping to conduct the experiments.

At the age of nineteen, Rikku’s father helped her to invest in a small apartment of her own. While he would have preferred that she move into an apartment further from his own (what father doesn’t hope their children will outshine them?) Rikku chose to continue live in a nearby neighborhood so that she might remain close to her father and within the community she grew up in.

A little less than a year ago, Sid and Rikku received word via a letter written by Anki that Anki and a group of friends chose to attempt to cross to the outside. No word has been heard from him since his departure, and even Sid has apparently lost hope for his son’s return. Rikku clings to the hope that her brother is still alive and will not stand to hear otherwise.

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