gymconquering

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NAME: Holo
AGE: 22
CONTACT: hologramblue
CHARACTERS IN GAME: n/a



CHARACTER NAME: Sapphire Birch
CANON & HISTORY: Pokemon Adventures | Wiki link
AGE: 15
CANON POINT: end of ORAS chapter
PERSONALITY:

The core of Sapphire's personality is her passion and energy. She does nothing by halves: when she feels an emotion, she feels it and shows it and acts it out entirely; when she commits to a course of action, she throws herself into the effort and sees it to completion; when she has a thought or opinion or desire, she thinks on it and expresses it with minimal restraint. She's a very physically expressive person, as well as a physically strong person, and gives the impression of being very comfortable and confident existing in her own skin and interacting with the world around her - she slaps friends on the back, dives into water and climbs to high places for the sheer fun of it, and, of course, loves the exercise of strength and skill that is a good Pokemon battle more than anything. She can be an overbearing or overwhelming person to be around, but she's normally fairly cheerful and optimistic, and is effortlessly kind, sometimes giving in to a petty desire to frustrate or disrupt people but never to do real harm.

Despite seeming loud and brash when excited, Sapphire is defined as much by her wit as by her willingness to jump into a fight. She has no patience and little aptitude for books and quiet study (and lags behind in reading ability for her age), but she is very, very observant, takes an analytical approach to new situations, and is good at quickly drawing conclusions about how things in her environment interact. Sapphire learned this way of interacting with her world from her father, a respected Pokemon researcher, who she grew up learning fieldwork methodology from; to her, the process of collecting data and analyzing it isn't a special, scientific procedure, but just a natural way of thinking.

For all that she's both kind and analytical, one of Sapphire's greatest failings is actually that she's not very good at getting into other people's heads, and doesn't naturally pick up on their motivations and thought processes. She's nice, of course, always willing to work with and wishing the best for people, and plenty observant enough to watch people's actions and predict what might result of them, but she's just so good at being herself that she doesn't much consider what not being herself might be like. She can be prone to personality clashes, growing frustrated when what makes sense to her doesn't make sense to someone else, and often being unable to compromise her emotions and actions to make a relationship work (or becoming miserable if she tries to do so). On the flip side, the same trait can also make her too trusting when she shouldn't be - she generally assumes that people who have done helpful things in the past are acting with friendly intentions, and betrayed is a feeling she doesn't have the experience to cope with well.

She's overcome and grown through some interesting conflicts in her life, but one concern that lingers for Sapphire is a need to have some control over her circumstances. Usually this just means mastery of her own capabilities - she's always known that the world is big and uncontrollable, but being strong means being able to do something about anything bad that happens, rather than just having to sit and endure it. Fulfilling this desire for competence and capability - through Pokemon battle, for instance - is something Sapphire finds very motivating and fulfilling. Having her agency in a situation taken away - by withholding information from her about a disaster until it's too late for her to act, for instance - is a source of great upset for her. Sapphire expects herself not only to be capable, but to use that capability to good ends, and it's that image of herself that drives her identity as a Pokemon trainer.

POWERS: Sapphire will be unable to Mega Evolve any of her Pokemon in low-frequency worlds, as that requires some weird spiritual/psychic work on the trainer's part. Her Pokemon will keep basic, more "innate" or biological abilities, like breathing fire/punching hard/flying with leaves for wings, but won't be able to pull off techniques that are more like "powers", like Kirly's Psychic-type moves, Chic's Blast Burn, Troppy's Magical Leaf and Solar Beam, etc etc etc.
OTHER: Pokemon roster here.



MAGIC ABILITY: Sapphire can copy the ability of a person she is in physical contact with. She is subject to all limits and conditions on the original power, and must make some amount of skin-to-skin contact to be able to use it.
PRICE: Sapphire's Pokedex
ACCLIMATION: 7. Physically speaking, Sapphire is extremely capable and very adaptable, able to survive in the wilderness and deal with a long-term lack of modern amenities. Emotionally, Sapphire's also quite resilient and is more than able to push through despair and stay productive, but being away from home - not just her boyfriend and other important people, but the Pokemon-based environment, the climate and geography of the Hoenn region, and the trainer culture her life has revolved around - is going to hurt, and the hurt will be chronic.



LINKED SAMPLE: TDM threads 1, 2